B1BLOG

Tak­ing the long-term per­spec­tive, which is worse:

1. The news that North Korea has test-detonated a nuclear bomb, or

2. The real­i­sa­tion that, in the near future, peo­ple every­where will be watch­ing TV clips on their mobiles and annoy­ing the hell out of other peo­ple who are try­ing to get on with their lives?

If, like me, you think the answer is 2, then the news com­ing out of this week’s Las Vegas Con­sumer Elec­tron­ics Show (CES) won’t make you feel much bet­ter. The show appears obsessed with TV. Last year, yet again, it was HDTV; this year, it’s the many dif­fer­ent ways to get TV onto your mobile, not to men­tion IP-enabled TV sets.

“He had as much imag­i­na­tion as a pint-pot,” Shel­ley once said of his fellow-poet Wordsworth, and he wasn’t being com­pli­men­tary. Sift­ing through the announce­ments from CES, I’m start­ing to think a sim­i­lar lack of imag­i­na­tion must apply to lead­ers of tech­nol­ogy companies.

Is this obses­sion with TV the best the con­sumer tech indus­try can come up with? Why are all these com­pa­nies work­ing so hard to turn us into a planet of brain-addled pas­sive con­sumers, agog for what­ever dig­i­tal enter­tain­ment dull media com­pa­nies con­de­scend to pipe through to us?

The mes­sage appears to be this. We are going to hell in a hand-cart but, luck­ily, the hand-cart is now fit­ted with a Sling­Box. And we’re meant to be grateful?

No related posts.