For anyone who’s ever held a brief conversation with me, it’s pretty apparent that I have a strange knack for pop culture factoids and a general interest in celebrity gossip. Also apparent is the fact that I know a lot about the latest plot lines of primetime and daytime TV shows. I’m that person who always gets the comment, “You must watch a lot of TV”. From the outside, it would appear that I’m probably the person with the premium HD cable plus DVR package hooked up to my extremely large, flat screen LCD who spends a large chunk of her free time getting information from this “visual feed.”
The truth of the matter is, I don’t own a television and haven’t for almost five years now. All of my TV watching is done either in the living room of friends’ apartments or during dinner on the 12” CRT in the kitchen that I share with my landlord. The total amount of time actually spent “watching” TV in either of these two traditional formats takes up less than about 5% of my life – which when you factor in medical school, studying, sleeping, imbibing, and more medical school seems about right. So how does someone like me “watch” TV these days? Simply put, the Internet.
The internet has been an amazing tool for those without the necessary monetary funds to watch, stream, download, or have recapped the most recent in television episodes and day to day news. The best part about the internet is that you can fast forward at will (like DVR w/o the box) to watch only those scenes or bits you care about. Youtube with all it’s participants who clip scenes from TV shows and movies also make it easy to find and watch only those parts I want to watch. But more importantly, for someone as impatient and with a short an attention span as me, the internet has also allowed me to “watch” TV in the most ingenious way possible – by reading about it. In a truly bizarre twist of using the visual sense, most days I process what’s found on broadcast or cable television by reading or more accurately skimming articles about it.
Some would say that I’m not really experiencing this visual media as it’s meant to be, but I tend to disagree. While there is credence to the argument that by reading about TV shows and episodes, I’m essentially reading about someone else’s experience of traditional visual media. I’m “second hand” experiencing TV. Despite not experiencing this first hand, I don’t think this diminishes the
First off, I’m notoriously impatient and attention deficient for more than 45 seconds at a time. Little things catch my interest and quickly my mind wanders into a tangent. Actually watching television for me can be excruciating since plotlines play out in “real time” over the TV complete with commercial breaks and writers trying to develop characters or create anticipation and suspense. When actually watching a physical TV, I tend to watch three shows at once, skipping between them during commercial breaks or scenes with characters I don’t care about. [As an aside, when I was a child I firmly held to this belief that shows on odd and even numbered stations broadcast commercials at alternating times, thus allowing one to watch at least two shows at once – don’t ask why I believed this.] Anyone who’s ever let me have control of the TV remote quickly develops a need for Excedrin migraine medication and a need to regain control of the remote for the sake of their sanity.
So how does “reading” about TV work for me? Well, I read a lot faster than I can “watch” TV. By reading, there’s the ability to skim information after a short and quick perusal, without losing much information with the added speed. With visual media, the “skip ahead 10 seconds” mode isn’t as smooth or coherent as skimming in reading and I find that more often than not, there are certain plot points that I miss. Playing things on 2x or 4x speed is another option, but the way that voice frequency is increased when the visual play speed increases bothers me to no end. In the end, it’s still reading/skimming that’s the fastest way for me to gain the information I need to know/care to know. If it sounds interesting and I want the visual cues, I’ll go back and watch the entire episode – usually skipping at 10 second intervals at a time.
