The Watchers
My satellite provider is advertising a pocket-sized player to download TV shows for later viewing- literally pocket-sized; the smallest model boasts a 2 inch screen. While I certainly want to watch my favorite shows on the smallest screen available, it does seem to run counter to the prevailing trend. The past decade or so has seen a dramatic increase in good screen size (not including the fuzzy projection screens you find in sports bars, with the three color projectors never quite aligned). The smallest plasma screens are larger than any TV I've ever owned. No doubt in the near future we'll see ads offering to cover part of the cost of remodeling your home to have a wall large enough for the home-theater-sized screens.
I know it's not the tiny little screen that's the selling point here; this way people can download a TV show and watch anywhere, anytime. It helps protect people from seeing the scenery around them, interacting with other people, and all the other pre-historic, hopelessly backward activities that involve looking elsewhere than at a video screen.
Before the advent of computers and the Net, one could often spend many waking hours at a time not looking at a TV screen- even in one's own home! Nowadays one has to hike into the deep woods to not be in line of sight of a screen, and no doubt to some that is a scary thought indeed. For a lot of people a constantly-on video screen has become part of their everyday growing-up environment. They are lost, as if trapped in a city where everyone speaks a different language, when coping with a situation where they can't focus their eyes on a TV.
Now I'm not knocking TV by any means; I certainly watch at least my fair share of the boob tube. I also have a collection of those quaint bound sheets of pages with printing on them, and managed to keep myself entertained when a hurricane left me without power for a week. I remember one of the 'futuristic' touches of the design for Moonbase Alpha was that one was never out of sight of a video screen; that much of The Future seems to have caught up with us.
I know it's not the tiny little screen that's the selling point here; this way people can download a TV show and watch anywhere, anytime. It helps protect people from seeing the scenery around them, interacting with other people, and all the other pre-historic, hopelessly backward activities that involve looking elsewhere than at a video screen.
Before the advent of computers and the Net, one could often spend many waking hours at a time not looking at a TV screen- even in one's own home! Nowadays one has to hike into the deep woods to not be in line of sight of a screen, and no doubt to some that is a scary thought indeed. For a lot of people a constantly-on video screen has become part of their everyday growing-up environment. They are lost, as if trapped in a city where everyone speaks a different language, when coping with a situation where they can't focus their eyes on a TV.
Now I'm not knocking TV by any means; I certainly watch at least my fair share of the boob tube. I also have a collection of those quaint bound sheets of pages with printing on them, and managed to keep myself entertained when a hurricane left me without power for a week. I remember one of the 'futuristic' touches of the design for Moonbase Alpha was that one was never out of sight of a video screen; that much of The Future seems to have caught up with us.
