Politics & Power Quote by Ronald Steel

Steel is diagnosing a quiet cultural takeover: not television as entertainment, but television as an architectural style for perception. “Television has made places look alike” isn’t just a complaint about suburban sameness or chain-store sprawl; it’s an argument that the camera’s logic travels outward and reorganizes reality in its image. Once a medium standardizes what looks “normal,” cities, living rooms, even bodies start chasing that template. The screen doesn’t merely reflect America; it pressures America to become more screen-friendly.

The sharper move is the second sentence, where Steel shifts from geography to cognition. “Transformed the way we see” suggests a rewiring of attention itself: what counts as an event, how quickly we demand payoff, how we convert complexity into a sequence of legible pictures. “Looking at the world through a lens” lands as both metaphor and indictment. A lens selects, frames, edits; it turns experience into content. Steel’s subtext is that mediation is never neutral. It smuggles in values: immediacy over depth, spectacle over context, recognition over discovery.

The “whole generation…maybe two” line carries a historian’s alarm without melodrama. It points to scale and irreversibility: if your baseline reality is pre-framed, you don’t experience television as an influence. You experience it as eyesight. Written from the vantage of late-20th-century mass media critique, the quote anticipates today’s feed-based life with eerie clarity: the problem isn’t that we watch screens, it’s that screens teach us how to watch everything else.