Television programming is a curious thing. There are nights when there’s nothing worth watching and others where all the good stuff’s on at the same time.
We refuse to watch the best of a bad selection. We’d rather just turn the television off.
Of course that’s where video recording works its magic. (That’s right. Video. We haven’t moved into hard drive recording yet.) On the really good nights we can watch one show and record another. That gives us some good programming for the dud nights.
This raises problems of its own. Do you ever watch a programme you videoed some time back and want to talk about it the next day?
If we’ve taped a show and then finally get to see it weeks or even months later it’s hard to remember that not everyone watched it at the same time. We get so used to saying, “Did you see such and such last night?” that you almost forget that you were watching an old programme that everyone else saw three months ago. It’s almost like some kind of weird time travel.
It’s a problem that will only get bigger. More and more people are downloading programming to watch whenever they choose, or watching DVDs. Our viewing habits are changing forever.
Is talking about last night’s viewing over the office water cooler becoming a thing of the past? Are we on the verge of losing a shared experience? Does that mean we’ll have to start talking about things that really matter when we get to work in the morning?
Posted by Rodney Olsen
Technorati Tags: Television – Video – Shared Experiences
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