cyclists in snow

Part II of my escape your TV challenge (part I is here).

For whatever reason watching television requires the synchronicity of all other viewers to be really enjoyable. Whatever is on, you can be sure millions of others are staring at the same bullshit at the same moment. This obviously creates some sense of imagined community, some remote connectivity via the shared info/image/distraction flow. I started to record everything I might or might not want to watch and then usually just forget about it – even The Simpsons. (This effect corresponds with Cory Doctorow’s notion of the Outboard Brain – your VCR/TiVo just can watch TV better than you.)