Erik Marshall

Finally, the football season has started, the Lions have broken their road losing streak, and all is good in the world.

Every year, the technology of watching sports changes, further mediating our relation to that which we watch. Today, for me, was an incredibly hyper-mediated day, I feel my brain is completely saturated. I am edgy.

Here are some of the things I’ve noticed. Watching the Lions on FOX, I try to tune the radio to the local sportscasters, in part because they’re smarter than the FOX idiots, in part because the radio guys explain more about what’s happening on the field, and they are homers, after all, rooting for the Lions like the rest of us. Problem is, the radio broadcast is a few second ahead of the TV, which means that I know that the Bears kick returner has passed the 15 and tackled at the 18 while on TV he’s just past the 5. No good. So I’m stuck with the idiots. Now they have the score on top, along with the quarter, the down and yard-to-go just before the play begins, and a continuous window with other scores, to the right and below the top strip. Mostly the same as last year, except when the other-games window changes, the yellow border around the team that is ahead flashes. This bothers me every time it happens, because flashing yellow means, to me, something important going on with the game I am watching, so my attention is constantly drawn to the upper-right side of the screen, to games in which I have a passing interest, but nothing that is immediately important to me. One interesting feature here, though, is a text scroll that tells you a Game Break is coming up, so you can anticipate a highlight from some other game.

There’s more…

Add to that the fact that I am running into the office during every commercial to check the status of my fantasy football team and to IM with my friends, whom I have invited into a Yahoo Chat. (It is true that I have a TV card in my computer, so I could do this all on the same screen, in different windows, but I have been too lazy to run the cable to the office). I may never see a Chargers game, but I will know all of Ladanian Tomlinson’s stats on a weekly basis, in real time, updated in the Java app on the fantasy football site. Between the TV and the computer, I am aware, on some level, of what is happening in virtually every NFL game today.

This is the other extreme from my recent trip to Isle Royale, where everything I needed to live for five days was on my back, I was outside all the time, cell phones did not work, there were no roads. It was nice, but I craved some of this stuff. The goal, I think, is to find the middle ground, where technology helps you do the things you want to do, instead of becoming the thing you need to tend to, to pay attention to, to fix and tweak and correct and patch and upgrade, as an object in itself, that make more work instead of making work easier.

In the meantime I have to find a way to get a networked computer into the living room, and invent a device that will delay the radio broadcast so it is in sync with the television. See?