I was reading diepunyhumans.com, and quite enjoyed (and personally related to!) Alan Taylor's musings on a life where TiVo has always existed…
[…] My daughter was only 3 months old when [the TiVo] arrived and we set it up. As far as my daughter knows, TiVo has always been around. Now that she (and our TiVo) are three years old, and there are some very interesting things I've been able to observe. […]
First - she doesn't watch much TV (an allotted hour per day), but when she does watch it, she gets a choice of a recent episode of any of her favorite pre-recorded shows (current favorites are Dora the Explorer and Caillou), and she can watch it at any time of day. We get to choose what shows we'd like to allow her to watch, set up a Season Pass, and we're done.Second - Commercials are an infrequent novelty to her. We always fast-forward through commercials, or watch non-commercial shows. When she does occasionally see a full commercial, she's fascinated, and will often ask us to stop so she can see what's going on. How can we demonstrate to her the evils of commercial interruption, when she has never had to experience it?
Third - Ignorance of Schedules/Programming - she has no idea when her favorite shows are on, never has. She gets quite confused when we are watching a non-TiVo TV, and she asks to watch ''a kids show'', and we have to explain that this TV won't do what ours at home does. We've sometimes shortened this explanation to ''This TV is broken'', which she seems to accept, and will wait until we get home to watch our ''fixed'' TV. […]
(Read the full entry at kokogiak.com.) I love that the best explanation that they could come up with was that the other TV is "broken". I can relate to the 3-year-old in question-- when we visit my parents' TiVo-less house, I constantly find myself wanting to pause a program (while someone's talking), rewind (to catch something that I missed), skip through commercials, etc. It's really strange to find that there isn't anything on that you want to watch.
Posted by rv at January 15, 2004 01:01 PM to geek