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Saturday, March 26, 2005
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TV-B-GONE DELUXE Why, UD’s daughter wanted to know, wasn’t UD scared by the film The Ring? UD responded that she thinks it has to do with her tv disability. As you know (unless you’re visiting the new-look University Diaries for the first time), UD does not watch tv. Except for the last presidential election returns, when she was hoping Kerry would win, UD has not watched tv in many years. So many years, in fact, that UD is now fully television-disabled. She has lost her capacity for tv receptivity. She no longer has that virtually universal willingness to be pulled toward every lit square in the vicinity. For UD the subject of tv, the turning on of tvs, and the running of tvs, is boring and embarrassing. It’s been ages since she felt the tv-specific depression so many people feel when they robotically watch. Just as UD has noticed that there are some buildings so ugly she actually doesn’t see them, so television, she recognizes, has become the thing everyone else sees that she does not see. She’s like the brain-damaged people in Oliver Sacks’s books, except that she’s only tv-aphasic. She sees everything else. So when, in The Ring, the television screens out of which the disturbed little girl emerges suddenly turn on all by themselves with a creepy electronic whoosh that's supposed to make you jump out of your skin, UD yawns. The fear-effect of the film depends upon your finding scary the idea that this friend to us all, this most beloved and familiar of household appliances, has become an uncontrollable conveyor of horror. But since for UD the television set represents not a friend but a faintly embarrassing emanation, like a lazy fart, there’s no fright. Although few Americans, UD figures, have attained UD's total-tv-erasure, the web-server-crashing sales of TV-B-Gone (see UD, 10/22/04, 11/5/04, and 1/6/05 for background) suggest that she is far from alone in her attitudes. In a nice essay updating the TV-B-Gone phenomenon (in which a solo entrepreneur with a website, a guy named Mitch, invented a small black object which, when touched near any television, turns the television off), Andrew Ferguson notes that “Mitch's press has been so approving and so voluminous, with dozens of jokey stories in newspapers and magazines, that he has yet to spend a dime on publicity. The website of gadget-happy Wired magazine featured the TV-B-Gone the day Mitch started up. That morning he sold 1,200 units online until his web server crashed. The next day he sold 2,300 more before the server crashed again. Since November he's sold another 40,000, with demand showing no signs of slack.” UD bought four TV-B-Gones (Christmas presents). They took awhile to get to her. Mitch apologized about this on his website. He was unprepared to handle customer volume. Ferguson has tracked down Mitch and interviewed him: ' ”The TV is always on,” [Mitch] says, “whether there's anybody there or not. And really, the last thing you want to see while you're doing your laundry is things blowing up, reports of murders, crime and stuff. Or Dr. Phil [see UD, 10/6/04]." He shudders visibly. "I've never been in there when people are really watching it. They're distracted by it, but that's different. So when I pull out my TV-B-Gone and turn the TV off, they go back to their book, or they talk to each other, or they watch the laundry go round and round and round. Nobody ever gets annoyed." It was under similarly prosaic circumstances that the idea for TV-B-Gone came to him. He was having dinner with friends in a neighborhood restaurant. Up in a corner near the ceiling a television screen flickered. The sound was muted, but Mitch and his friends found themselves turning their attention to it anyway--an experience that every citizen of every country wired with electricity has had at one time or another. "You could just feel this screen suck the energy right out of the conversation," he says. "I thought, 'Gee, I wish I could turn that thing off." ' People eventually intuit, Ferguson comments, the coercive nature of many of the screens in public places: ' Wal-Mart announced last month that it was heavily investing in thousands of new 42-inch high-definition LCD televisions, to be placed strategically throughout all its stores. Every Wal-Mart is already a riot of television screens, of course, but as a company spokesman complained to the New York Times, the existing TV monitors were bolted "high above shoppers' heads and easily overlooked." Let them just try to overlook a 42-inch high LCD screen. Let them just try. ' And now, to make things even more interesting, a war’s hotting up: 'Inevitably, there has been a backlash. CNN, which owns all those Blitzer-blaring TVs in all those airports, is reportedly trying to concoct a way for its TV monitors to identify a remote signal from a TV-B-Gone and ignore it. ("That's okay," says Mitch with a shrug. "I'll just make a TV-B-Gone Deluxe.") ' You go, baby! |