Club Penguin
So a bit more background on my temporary kind-of radio silence: I’m working from home, where, thanks to a vaguely explained snafu on the part of our good friends at Verizon, I have been without DSL since yesterday morning. So I’ve moved “home,” for the moment, to a cafe with wi-fi. (Which, this being Park Slope, Brooklyn, is currently rocking out to the children’s-folk-rock stylings of Dan Zanes.) Mmmmm. Delicious, delicious bandwidth.
Well, when life hands you DSLemons, you make DSLemonade. Without the distraction of electro-contact, I flew through a draft of an early review of Mad Men’s season premiere. And I decided to use the experience as a teaching moment / discussion post.
The Tuned In Jrs. have, of course, been hit hard by the outage, which apparently came amid an extremely important event at Club Penguin. Forced to live, for an entire day or more, like medieval peasants—with only cable TV, Tivo and their parents’ 3G iPhones—I asked what it taught them about their priorities: if forced, would they rather give up TV or the Internet?
Tuned In Jr., with a quickness that should chill any TV executive with plans for the future, answered that he’d give up TV. (He then backpedaled, saying that it would depend. Sorry: Daddy is a journalist, so Daddy demands a simple narrative.) Tuned In Jr. Jr., who’s younger and still likes more passive entertainment, reacted as if I’d asked him to choose between Mommy and Daddy. (At least I’m hoping that decision would be equally hard.)
I’m tempted to frame this as a generational thing, and I would bet money that as the younger kid gets older, he’ll value the Internet more and TV less. But honestly, their middle-aged dad would choose the Internet over TV too, and I write about TV for a living. Granted, it’s a bit of a cheat for me. Much of my professional work depends either on advance DVDs or screeners streamed online, and like anyone I can cobble together a fair amount of “TV” online, between Hulu, Netflix and the like.
It works the other way too, and I suppose eventually that the two will merge so much as to be indistinguishable; already video has migrated out of the living room and data has migrated into it, so that we increasingly marinate, from car to office to couch, in a constant video cloud of ubiqui-TV. But for now, the ways that my TV can substitute for my computer (YouTube and Yahoo via Tivo and so on) aren’t as satisfying as the way my computer can substitute for TV. [Update: By way of comparison, here’s my account of a week without TV.]
Maybe I should rephrase the question: Is there anyone out there who would choose TV over the Internet? I look forward to reading your answers someday, because I suspect they’re going to kick me out of this cafe any day now.