Future Files:TV Will Destory Your Mind (if it hasn’t done so already)
Posted On: 09 April 2008 By: Jay Oatway Filed Under: Culture Wars | Future-Stuff-That-Goes-Ping | Info-slavery | Jump the Shark | Video Replaces Writing
It’s once again Web Wednesday in Hong Kong tonight. This week’s special guest is from television — no she’s not famous. She’s Ivy Wong, COO for TVB.com (one of Hong Kong’s local broadcasters — Warning: the site’s not English-language friendly).
However, since the Web Wednesday gathering is really about the schmoozing, I’ve decided to help give everyone a little more TV-related conversation to impress each other with tonight.
First up, consider the expression “Tuning In.” Does anyone remember physically doing this? [via BoingBoing Gadgets]
“Tune in”
Common definition: To understand someone’s message. (e.g. “Turn on; Tune in; Drop out.”)
Original definition: Literally, to turn the dial of a radio to receive a certain frequency.
First use: It’s hard to pinpoint when tuning in went from its radio jargon roots to hit it big in primetime TV but we’d put our money on the original Batman series. Tune in tomorrow! Timothy Leary’s admonishment (above) may have juiced its use somewhat, too.
But just what are we tuning in to watch these days? Do any of us even watch the same thing? And when we do, is it any good? Chris Anderson
“TV is not vulgar and prurient and dumb because the people who compose the audience are vulgar and dumb. Television is the way it is simply because people tend to be extremely similar in their vulgar and prurient and dumb interests and wildly different in their refined and aesthetic and noble interests.”
But then again, YouTube, with all its infinite room for refined aesthetic and noble interests, still produces a lot of vulgar, prurient and dumb content. Just check out Lewis Black’s Root of All Evil debate of which is more harmful for society, Porn or YouTube. (The verdict: YouTube!)
But the real reason all this crap exists: it is really hard to make good TV anymore. It’s so hard, in fact, that the less you know about the making of TV, the happier you will be: [via Warren Ellis]
In my experience, TV is as what von Bismarck once said: “To retain respect for sausages and laws, one must not watch them in the making.”
And it’s also important to take into consideration, especially with a broadcasters like TVB, that cultural differences make for what may seem like bizarre programming decisions. For example [via Yahoo!]
D’oh! A Venezuelan TV channel has yanked “The Simpsons” off the air because it may be inappropriate for children. Taking its place: “Baywatch Hawaii.”
But perhaps it’s for the best to protect children from the evils of TV. Studies have proven that all children — from infants to teens — suffer health risks from watching TV [via Science Daily, here and here]
Infants and toddlers who sleep less than 12 hours a day are twice as likely to become overweight by age 3 than children who sleep longer. In addition, high levels of television viewing combined with less sleep elevates the risk, so that children who sleep less than 12 hours and who view two or more hours of television per day have a 16 percent chance of becoming overweight by age 3.
Furthermore, University of Minnesota School of Public Health researchers have found that older adolescents who have a bedroom television are less likely to engage in healthy activities such as exercising, eating fruits or vegetables, and enjoying family meals. They also consumed larger quantities of sweetened beverages and fast food, were categorized as heavy TV watchers, and read or studied less than teens without TVs in their bedrooms.
But forget that. Let’s look at all the great new ways that you can watch TV:
With a built in Blue-Ray, a slew of ultra thin HDTVs and LaserVue promised by the end of the year (yes, laser TVs will make your HDTV obsolete), and the always ridiculous mobile TV [via Engadget]:
Of course, TV is doomed to fail despite all this, at least that’s what the Internet guys want us to believe [via Reuters]
The Internet will usurp television as the biggest advertising medium in Britain by the end of 2009, according to a report published on Monday.
Britain has the most developed online advertising market in the world which the report by the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB), PricewaterhouseCoopers and the World Advertising Research Centre said was worth 2.8 billion pounds ($5.6 billion) in 2007.
The Internet is great, there is even a lot of hype right now about a TV show that doesn’t even exist: Shadow Unit [via Beyond the Beyond]
“Got a title?” he asked.
“It’s called Shadow Unit,” I said. It had never occurred to me that it was called anything else; it was as if I’d already seen it on the TV schedule and was ready to program it into the TiVo I don’t have…”
“…He was also right when he pointed out that TV shows have a writing staff. I’d been thinking that, too. These characters needed more people to tell their stories. They needed perspectives outside my own, and a wider range of writing styles and narrative obsessions than I could manage. If they had that, the whole project would seem bigger, richer–more real…”
“…That was the oyster: a team of creators who were up for an experiment, possibly the best television writing staff that never wrote television. We added to the bible, to the world behind the stories, to the physics of the Anomaly and the complexity of the characters. Bear and Sarah each spotted holes in the Shadow Unit cast, and filled them with new characters who added even more depth to the history and mythology of the show. We expanded the storytelling into new forms. And my concept, the non-existent show I wanted to write for, became the pointy grain of sand around which those creators built a pearl.
“It’s a bigger and shinier pearl than I could ever have imagined. And it’s still growing.”
Well, that concludes our whirlwind tour of the latest strangeness in TV. Hopefully, if you are coming tonight, somewhere in all those links you can find a little nugget to amuse your fellow Web Wednesday geeks.
If you are reading this from some other part of the world, please, by all means, sit back and relax in front of the TV tonight.
The future is still a couch potato.
