Erik Marshall

Digital poetics has an excellent piece on The Ring and House of Leaves and nostalgia for the days of analog and its degradation: Marshall McLuhan’s notion that any new medium takes as its content the form of the previous medium is clear here: digital media makes visible and reprocesses the very form of analogue media. [...]

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This has been getting a lot of press, and for good reason. The TV-B-Gone is a neat little key-fob gadget that can turn off most televisions. I love the idea. It seems like everytime I go out to eat there’s a television set somewhere in sight, so it ends up my companion and I spend dinner looking over each other’s shoulder at the TV. I have a strange affliction when it comes to moving images: I cannot fall asleep during even the most hideously boring movies, and I cannot take my eyes off of a television set, no matter what’s on, so I find myself trying to find a seat that doesn’t afford a view of an idiot box. With the TV-B-Gone, people have a choice. Of course, it won’t be long before public places simply put a piece of paper or something over the infrared receiver on the TV, but for now, for $15, you can have the power to decide for yourself and everyone else in the bar, airport, or hospital to have some peace and quiet.

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Hypermediation has not only changed the way we watch football, with fantasy football leagues, instant stats, yellow first-down lines, and the general proliferation of infomration, but it has also changed the way the game is played. The red flag challenge rule is one obvious example, where the coach can challenge a play by throwing a [...]

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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…

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