Is Television Passé?

For several years, we received cable on our television free of charge, despite our best efforts to regularly complain to the local cable provider. They would promise to look into it, weeks would go by, and we would still have a full 70 channels. 

Last fall, I put my foot down with the cable company and harassed them until they FINALLY pulled the plug. Unfortunately, it happened exactly one week before the 2008 U.S. election, and we had invited a number of friends  to come over to watch the election with us. We had to do something fast or it would be a quiet evening.

As it turned out, November 4 was a night of joy. We had invited our friends over, ostensibly to watch "the end of the Bush era," but what we were really hoping for was the chance to celebrate the victory of Barack Obama. The gathering was a cross-section of generations, nationalities, men, women, friends and family come together to watch an historical event. But aside from the politically significant aspects of the evening, there was also a more subtle historical shift occurring that night.

Since we had no television, I had to rig up a media centre from which we could monitor the election results. I brought my MacBook downstairs from my home office. Relying on our wireless modem, and using a second monitor I lugged upstairs from my husband's home office in the basement, we were able to watch two different Web sites - cnn.com's live action news, and CNN's interactive Web site showing electoral returns from across the various states. 

While the evening was all about Obama, upon reflection over the next few days, I realized that it was the first election night in my entire life (and I have been watching elections for as long as I can remember because in my family, every election is important) that I had not turned on the television or the radio. It is not so much a coincidence as a given that my first Internet-only election was won by a very Internet-savvy politician. This was probably the first election where the Internet, as a medium, had more influence over the outcome than any other medium. Building on Howard Dean's use of the Internet in the 2004 election, Obama's team parlayed the Web into a grassroots fund-raising machine and a key communication channel. The Obama administration continues to use the Internet as a critical component of their communications strategy, recognizing that many people, especially young people, get their information from the Internet.

Given the decline in both television and newsprint news, it certainly appears that the Internet is fast becoming most people's number one news medium, whether through conventional news organizations such as CNN or The New York Times (two news organizations that have made very successful leaps to Internet-based news), or through the "mash up" sites that gather news from a variety of sources and present it, or through more politically focused Web sites, such as the Huffington Post. 

But what of entertainment? Clearly, television is still the favoured device for watching entertainment. But how long will it be before televisions and computers converge? Indeed, they already are, with digital services delivered via cable's bandwidth and PSPs, iPods, and other handheld devices allowing users to watch movies in miniature. And once televisions and computers converge, will there be any further requirement for television shows to be delivered via commercial television stations?

The fact is, commercial television is passé. It is too rigid in its structure, too out-of-date with today's attention deficit-afflicted society. For many people, watching television now involves mindlessly flipping through dozens, if not hundreds, of channels, over and over again, avoiding commercials and rarely stopping to watch a show in its entirety. This probably has a lot to do with the amount of garbage being broadcast, but it also reflects a change in our viewing habits - we have learned to bounce around the Web and our attention span has decreased. Television is linear, and if you stop too long at any given station, you are confronted with a barrage of commercials, prompting you to flip again. Television is an old technology, in terms of how we interact with it. It is only a matter of time before commercial television disappears completely. 

It is now over six months since our cable was finally cut off, and I can honestly say that I have not missed television for even a minute during those months. Of course, I still rent movies on DVD, and I often borrow friends' DVDs of television programs. But I am no longer controlled by commercial television, which forced me to schedule my life around its programs, and drew me in to watching more garbage than I care to admit.