We were visiting Partner's mother a few years ago when Partner noticed a wide strip of black electrical tape blocking the bottom three inches of her TV screen. "They're always running some stupid thing down there," his mother said. (I am editing out some of the more colorful language.) "I hate that stuff. I don't need to read anything at the bottom of the screen."
I know what she means.
I don't mind news feeds on news shows, or business feeds on business shows. But the stupid little logos that walk around and wave at you and generally distract you from your program - I really loathe them. (I make an exception for the football-player robot on “NFL on Fox.” He's cute and bouncy and weirdly attractive. But I digress.)
And is it just me, or are the bouncing logos getting bigger and bigger? More than once lately, they've actually obscured the action in the TV show.
It's based on the paradigm of the browser window. When I log into Yahoo!, I get all kinds of dancing imagery - ads, animations, notifications. (Actually I don't, because my Firefox browser blocks advertisements. But when I'm using other computers or browsers, I still suffer through them.)
The browser window is, in turn, based on the paradigm of the newspaper layout. Newspaper articles are layouts in space, not in time. They are surrounded by little boxed advertisements, and your eye bounces around and through them.
TV is not (I should say was not) based on the paradigm of the newspaper layout. TV is a layout in time. If you want to insert an advertisement, the standard method is to interrupt the program at given intervals and add a few commercials.
But we have all that space! someone thought. Why waste it? We can advertise new shows. We can do self-promotion. Maybe we can even do product tie-ins.
TV used to be a unique appliance. It did one thing: it showed broadcast programming. Nothing else in the house could do that. Nowadays, of course, kids look at TV and see a big screen, just like any other screen on any other device in the house. It's bigger than the other screens, and it has better picture quality, but that's about it. TV programming is no longer sacrosanct; it's something you can play with and reformat, like browser content.
I have noticed that, when I get on these topics, I get Andy Rooneyish. I don't mean to. I suppose it's partly my advanced age, which makes the past seem magically perfect and very quaint.
But I still haven't taped up the bottom of my TV screen. I like watching that football-player robot bouncing around. He's sort of hot.
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