Linsey Duncanchannel surfing stasis
January 3rd 2009 11:30
Last night my TV watching became to me like when you are craving something in the kitchen that tastes nice and you can't move on from searching for it and everything you try is just bland and unsatisfying. I was left in limbo searching in this case not for chocolate but for a program to watch.
I had enough channels to choose from. I was staying at a nice hotel with foxtel and the movie channel (though you have to pay for them so they weren't really an option but none of what was offered was any good anyway.)
But I couldn't find one channel worth pausing on for more than a minute. Nothing to hold my interest. I discovered the secret of foxtel is they are really just making you pay to watch repeats of shows once shown on free to air tv. If there had been a show I liked and it was a repeat I may have got some sleep because I would have been satiated for having seen something that I liked. Instead i spent the night searching. I kept thinking surely something would have something on in a minute. It wasn't til 2am I found and watched an episode of boston legal that I could feel satisfied and finally flick the switch.
The TV is yet another device in society that holds us in limbo. We are constantly being held there by the expectation of what will come on next. The rare moments we find a show we are immersed in and are engaged in enjoying the now are interspersed with adbreaks which we are frozen through like when we are frozen at traffic lights or a bus stop. The fear of missing what is to come wastes and squanders the now. Prevents now from ever being anything more than a waiting room for later.
I did want to do something more productive with my time last night. But I guess it is the dangerous gamblers trap that the possibility holds part of our attention hostage so you can never quite fully be there in another situation because there is this back of the mind part always glancing back, just in case. Ironically it is usually only when you finally get fed up and desperate enough to go away and commit yourself to something else that what you were waiting for comes through. In the case of Boston Legal I'd given up and had gone to have a shower. Fortunately for me this hotel room had a television in the bathroom so I was finally blissfully and perfectly content. It is funny that all I needed to see was one thing. I'd seen bits of hundreds of other things but the mind only seems to be satisfied if it has had somehing complete.
I had enough channels to choose from. I was staying at a nice hotel with foxtel and the movie channel (though you have to pay for them so they weren't really an option but none of what was offered was any good anyway.)
But I couldn't find one channel worth pausing on for more than a minute. Nothing to hold my interest. I discovered the secret of foxtel is they are really just making you pay to watch repeats of shows once shown on free to air tv. If there had been a show I liked and it was a repeat I may have got some sleep because I would have been satiated for having seen something that I liked. Instead i spent the night searching. I kept thinking surely something would have something on in a minute. It wasn't til 2am I found and watched an episode of boston legal that I could feel satisfied and finally flick the switch.
The TV is yet another device in society that holds us in limbo. We are constantly being held there by the expectation of what will come on next. The rare moments we find a show we are immersed in and are engaged in enjoying the now are interspersed with adbreaks which we are frozen through like when we are frozen at traffic lights or a bus stop. The fear of missing what is to come wastes and squanders the now. Prevents now from ever being anything more than a waiting room for later.
I did want to do something more productive with my time last night. But I guess it is the dangerous gamblers trap that the possibility holds part of our attention hostage so you can never quite fully be there in another situation because there is this back of the mind part always glancing back, just in case. Ironically it is usually only when you finally get fed up and desperate enough to go away and commit yourself to something else that what you were waiting for comes through. In the case of Boston Legal I'd given up and had gone to have a shower. Fortunately for me this hotel room had a television in the bathroom so I was finally blissfully and perfectly content. It is funny that all I needed to see was one thing. I'd seen bits of hundreds of other things but the mind only seems to be satisfied if it has had somehing complete.
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