Thursday December 08, 2005

Is It Ok to TV in Public?

The telecoms love to hype mobile TV. The analysts I’ve talked to are more than a little skeptical, and so am I—although I have to admit 800K at $1.99 doesn’t sound too shabby. But have you seen those people in that Samsung commercial, just lying around like a bunch of junkies? “The world is your living room,” the spot promises, but is it? Can it ever be? I’ve promoted the following question, posed by my good friend Pat, from comments. It gets at one good reason mobile TV might not catch on: Shame. He writes:

It hadn’t occurred to me that the problem with cellphone TV is that cellphones aren’t TVs. That’s an elegant analysis and probably true. But I was thinking that the imminent failure of this particular media vector would be due mostly to potential users’ fears of the explicit geeky sadness of doing something like sitting on the bus watching Friends on your iPod or cellphone. It seems to me that all of the other things we do while in public that save us from interacting are actually ways of interacting, albeit, dysfunctionally, by ignoring each other for good reasons.

We began by reading, which is a defensibly noble pursuit. We weren’t ignoring each other as such, we were just reading an important article/comic book/cheesecake publication and thus projecting an image of ourselves as well read/cool/ horny. Then transistor radios arrived on the scene. (“I’m not ignoring you, I’m just into this very important baseball game. As you can see, I am a fan.”) Then portable private music systems came along and, like the guy in the commercial, we all could have our own soundtrack. (“It’s not that I’m ignoring you, it’s just that this is the movie of my life not yours. You’re just in it.”) And now we’re all on our phones or snapping pictures of the dilapidation all around us or text messaging our possies or blogging about apparitions of Jesus and Mary in various foods, so we’re just really busy doing important stuff, not intentionally ignoring each other.

But you see, I think deep down inside we all know that watching TV, even good TV, is a little shameful. Being immediately good at watching TV is an evolutionary adaptation that was in place for us before the environment that the adaptation suited even existed, like our weakness for refined sugar or cocaine. And at some level we are aware of this quality that TV has, that it fits our brains like a key in a lock, and this makes us a little guilty about it. It’s too good to be good. And so I guess I’m wondering, are a lot of people going to be comfortable with being seen getting a fix in public?

Posted by jim at 12:57 AM ||