November 11, 2003
Rayne Today
Stirling Newberry, commenting under the post below (How has blogging changed your life?), shares a fascinating point:
...people like themselves more when they have become content producers, rather than merely consumers. The crinkly interaction of between peers - in the sense that everyone is a producer and consumer - opens whole new windows in our lives."
Perhaps this is the reason why television networks are scrambling, having mysteriously lost a segment of their market. Young people, particularly young men, aren't watching television.
Shocking! Imagine it, young people actually choosing to do something, instead of couch potato-ing and allowing entertainment to be fed intravenously via cable ... is this yet another sign of the decline of American society?
Please. To me it's no surprise that young people expect more than to be entertained. For too long they've had opportunities to do things - hands-on, getting sweaty-dirty doing - removed from them by increasing productivity and suburbanization. These people drifting away from television aren't leaving to return to manual labor; most of them haven't really known it their entire lives. It's this deprivation of doing that spawned XTREME sports and all the other X-PLETIVES you can name. They're in search of the authentic, the real deal, the genuine - it can't be provided vicariously through television.
Perhaps some of these folks fleeing the emptiness of the glass teat found blogging might fill the void. It allows for relationships with others at a new depth that might not have been found in other media. Granted, blogging is hardly the only experience on which they've been feeding; gaming, chatting, IM'g, texting may fill the hungry void, along with more of those X-TREMES.
I'd recently argued that our society is moving to a direct participation model from that of representation. We expect to have an active voice, not one that's diluted by arm's length and several degrees of separation, pushing us to passivity. The internet allows this directness. Television as we've known it hasn't; it's somebody else's watered down interpretation of entertainment cooked and fed to us. If we don't like it, it takes weeks and months for the noisome dish to be taken away and months to years before something tastier takes its place on the menu. We've found ways to cut out the middleman and get what we want, right now. It's the lack of immediacy, the lack of intimacy, which costs television its audience - and encourages blogging.
Yeah, we're serving it up, hot and fresh every minute of every day here in the blogosphere - there's surely something here to your taste. Do some XTREME Googling and order it up now. Or cook it up on your own, give your authentic self rein and create. When television can say the same thing, we might return to the couch.
So what's your take on this? Have you given up television for blogging or some other diversion? Is blogging replacing other forms of interaction for you? And does anyone want to speculate on how long it will take the corporate talking heads in television to figure out it's not just that programming stinks?
Posted by rayne at November 11, 2003 6:44 AM
"This is a good song. It's about TV executives. Dead ones." (John Bramwell, of I am Kloot, yesterday in Rotown)
The reason TV bashing is so popular right now is not just that we now have good alternatives. People will still want entertainment. And TV is still a good information medium. The problem is that TV hasn't been living up to expectations recently. Reality TV can't live up to the hype, the American Idol/Starmaker/whatever stars are gone before you notice them and the news is tainted by partisanism. Name one good sitcom and I'll name ten bad ones. Most TV is simply not worth watching. Right now we have a wealth of TV stations, most of which will have disappeared in ten years. The survivors will have incorporated internet technology and/or focused on one particular segment like cartoons or sports.
As an xtreme sports enthusiast I'm not so sure that "a deprivation of doing" is the cause behind xtreme sports.
But your post is right on the money me thinks.
It's not just that TV sucks, and there are alternatives (blogs, MMORGs, etc.), it's that we now have new ways to engage with TV.
With PVRs, we can push viewing offline. Almost any series with a following will be put in a DVD set that I can buy, or rent via Netflix/GreenCine.
I've already decided not to worry about keeping up with 24 during the season, and have found season one and two in the used bins at Tower Records.
TV's become a conscious decision: I will tape the one show I'm interested in following this season (Angel, but you already knew I'm a fanboi.) It comes on to watch the tape, or whatever GreenCine's delivered this week.
From Salon blogger Paul Hinrichs: "Blogging can be stressful when you approach it as a discipline (to write a little each day). Television was mostly already gone by the time I started blogging, however, with the exception of DVD movies, IFC, and Sundance. When I blog, or just play on the computer, NPR is generally on in the background. News surfing or food surfing replaced TV maybe 5 years ago and blogging hasn't changed that - but it has sharpened the focus. If I have a blog entry in mind, the surfing is becomes research for that. Compared to TV, the inputs are more highly selected and there is always the idea of producing an output of some sort. It might be food or a blog entry, sometimes both. So maybe it has replaced "the video" (I haven't watched network TV since the 80s), but gradually. Most of all, blogging replaced my participation in usenet (and before that CompuServe forums, which they liked to call "fora"). Maybe not much at all has changed other than the ea se of finding information and the ease of posting it, with window dressing that wasn't available in pure ASCII."
Posted at The Scobleizer by Fred of Concretewerk: "It all started with Buffy..." In my area Buffy used to come on at 6 pm and I got hooked. But I wasn't usually done work by 6, so I found myself torn between the TV room and the den. In the end I just got a laptop. Well, Buffy is still going in reruns (at a different time) but I'm in the habit of settling down with the laptop in front of the TV. 6 now sees Stargate, which is all reruns, and I find I seldom close the lid on the laptop when I'm watching TV any more. In fact,of the two screens I would say my focus is around 70% on the laptop screen. The laptop still gets put away for DVDs, though."
Rayne, what was the above posted in response to? Do you have a permalink to the relevant Scobleizer entry?
Tried embedding with "a href" tags but they didn't work. Here they are:
Entry at The Scobleizer at which Fred left comment:
http://radio.weblogs.com/0001011/2003/11/11.html#a5416
Fred at Concretewerk:
http://concretewerk.com/weblog/
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