On 20 Oct 2006 at 16:41, Paul Okami wrote: > To make clearer my problem with TV--*IT* controls the content, not me. > It's not that there aren't great programs, I just don't really--in > real life, not theoretical terms--get to decide what gets streamed into > my house.
> My children do get to see programs, but they are on DVD (PBS, BBC, > etc.), we control the transmission and decide when it is all going to > end. Having single DVDs suggests that it ends when the DVD is through. > You can say "Why the hell don't you just turn the set off when the > program you want to watch is finished?" That sounds good on paper, but > in a household of adults and children, where different people have > different, often spontaneous desires regarding programming (and 200 > channels beaming in at you), it just doesn't work out that way in my > experience. The TV stays on much longer than one intends, and material > enters your home that you did not invite in (commercials are only the > most glaring, and disgusting, example of this). I have sympathy for Paul's point, but there's a solution to his problem. We discovered it back in the late 70's or so when we bought what must have been the first video recorder in our town (a Sony beta, wouldn't you know). It unchained us from our TV. We no longer had to watch when and as long as the TV told us to, and we no longer had to endure commercials. We merely taped the programmes we wanted. We then watched them when we felt like it, stopped watching when we pleased, and gleefully zapped through commercials. And things have only gotten better. We now have one of the greatest technological achievements of humankind, rivaling the invention of sliced bread and Ben & Jerry's. In the Excited States you call it a Tivo; here we don't have a name for it (at least nothing catchy that I can remember) but it's essentially the same. Instead of messing with tape cartridges and difficulty in locating where on the tape a programme is, recorded programmes are stored on a generous hard disk, with instant retrieval. We can record two programmes simultaneously while watching a third recorded programme. And most remarkably, we can start watching a programme while the rest of it is still being recorded. There are other miraculous features. I realize that this is probably not news to most of you. But if Paul hasn't had a TV in the house since 1975, he may not be aware of what this little machine can do in liberating people from their TVs. In our house, the TV is no longer the boss of us. Stephen ----------------------------------------------------------------- Stephen L. Black, Ph.D. Department of Psychology Bishop's University e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] 2600 College St. Sherbrooke QC J1M 0C8 Canada Dept web page at http://www.ubishops.ca/ccc/div/soc/psy TIPS discussion list for psychology teachers at http://faculty.frostburg.edu/psyc/southerly/tips/index.htm ----------------------------------------------------------------------- --- To make changes to your subscription go to: http://acsun.frostburg.edu/cgi-bin/lyris.pl?enter=tips&text_mode=0&lang=english
