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bikkuri bahn

I remember as a young child watching the little trolley going through the model neighborhood (it was actually my favorite part of the program).  Anyway, an interesting take on change.

As a kid growing up in a car-centric American city, my first introduction to public transit came from Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. Fred Rogers’ bright-red Trolley conveyed me and all my fellow television neighbors from the rug in front of the living room console television to the Neighborhood of Make-Believe.

It was just a model train, but even as a very young child I understood the metaphor. Through this magic streetcar, everyone could get from their current location to a very distant one, all at once, and efficiently. Trolley was recognizable and dependable. Unlike Lady Elaine or Prince Tuesday, Trolley never let you down. It was a profound, quiet endorsement of the effectiveness of mass transit.

[...]

Trolley’s potential impact on the show’s very young viewers changes too. It’s not that original-Trolley somehow inspired a life of committed public transit use. Rather, that it offered an inroad, so to speak, for understanding the existence and function of trains and buses. That may not sound like much, but it meant that just about every American kid of the 1970s and 80s, most of whom were utterly surrounded by cars, got an early peek at an alternative.

The original Mr. Rogers Neighborhood trolley offered a subtle, implicit endorsement of public transit. Like so many effective media messages, positive and negative, it did most of this work by introducing something unfamiliar to most of its very young viewership—a rail-bound vehicle that transports lots of people at once from place to place—and then by normalizing that idea through repeated exposure on every episode. People ride transit, no big deal.

 

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/06/daniel-tiger-is-secretly-teaching-kids-to-love-uber/486800/

Edited by bikkuri bahn
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