Tag Archives: technology

Second Look TV

Ember

For most of it’s existence, TV was designed to be “one look” entertainment.  We were supposed to grasp things the first time, and if it happened that some complexity or nuanced escaped us, well, not to worry.  It can’t have been that important in any case.  TV was forgettable culture.  Tissue thin and completely disposable.

But we are entering into the era of “second look” television.  Sometimes this happens because we were making a sandwich or playing with the cat.  Never mind, a simple push of the go-back button, and we are caught up.

But some TV is now created with the expectation that we will not and cannot get it the first time.  If it pleases the court, I offer the following Sprint ad into evidence

Notice that it’s not just the dialog and foreign language(s) that demand the replay.  This ad has got Judy Greer who is fast rising from “sidekick” standing to full blown celebrity.  Plus there are parts that make no sense however many times we watch it.  (The final moment when everyone looks suddenly at the hamster is wonderful partly because it is inscrutable and permanently so.)

Pam, my wife, and I spend a lot of time freezing frame and going back.  “Wait, did she say what I think we said.”  Or “Hey, did you notice that guy in the background?” Or “get a lot of this camera angle!”  This is what it is to live with Second Look TV and the technology that makes replay effortless.

Indeed culture and technology do an attractive two-step here.  The technology makes this possible.  Culture (in the form of new complexity) makes it necessary.  And so continues  our steady transition from a pop culture to a culture, plain and simple.

Douglas Adams on generational rhythms in the adoption of tech

Douglas Adams was the author of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.  We have just passed the 10th anniversary of his death. 

In 1999, when the internet was still being greeted with some suspicion in some quarters. (Hey, just a couple of years ago, a group of planners at a big agency were prepared to tell me that social media was just a passing fancy.)  Adams wrote an essay that includes this wonderful passage that segments technology adopters by age:

Then there’s the peculiar way in which certain BBC presenters and journalists … pronounce internet addresses. It goes ‘www DOT … bbc DOT… co DOT… uk SLASH… today SLASH…’ etc., and carries the implication that they have no idea what any of this new-fangled stuff is about, but that you lot out there will probably know what it means.

I suppose earlier generations had to sit through all this huffing and puffing with the invention of television, the phone, cinema, radio, the car, the bicycle, printing, the wheel and so on, but you would think we would learn the way these things work, which is this:

1) everything that’s already in the world when you’re born is just normal;

2) anything that gets invented between then and before you turn thirty is incredibly exciting and creative and with any luck you can make a career out of it;

3) anything that gets invented after you’re thirty is against the natural order of things and the beginning of the end of civilisation as we know it until it’s been around for about ten years when it gradually turns out to be alright really.

It would certainly explain those planners.

Thanks for Steve Crandall for telling me about this essay.