Blank Screen

I had a hard time making myself sit in front of a blank screen for that long. I kept thinking of all of the other things I needed to do, and then I remembered I wasn’t allowed to make lists. So then I looked at how reflective my tv screen is. When it’s turned off, I can see a lot of the room. That made me think that I need to clean the living room. I really had to concentrate on keeping my eyes on just the screen. I found myself analyzing how the TV isn’t really in the center of the wall, and the spot of paint I got on the ceiling and never touched up when I painted the wall last year, and where each of the things on my mantle below the TV came from. You get the idea. I was very restless. Usually when I watch TV I’m also on Facebook, or folding clothes, or doing something else, so to just watch the blank screen felt very wrong. I was very uncomfortable, and felt like I was wasting my time. One of the first reflections I wrote for this class was about a show I was watching on Netflix that I saw as a guilty pleasure.  I really felt guilty just sitting here watching a blank screen. Eventually, I ended up just staring at the word “Panasonic” at the bottom of my TV and kind of zoning out. The theme song from the Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt was stuck in my head (that’s my newest Netflix show) and that drove me crazy as well. Twenty minutes can really be a loooooong time. I try to be aware of how much time I’m spending on screens, but I know that I waste more time than I should. With my boys “screen time” is a phrase that gets used often in my house. (As in screen time’s over!)

Staring at a blank screen is silly, and I feel like maybe the point of this exercise is to try to make you feel ridiculous for spending so much time staring at an object--- whether it’s on or not. But I can’t help but argue that staring at a blank screen is so much different than when it has content on it. When I‘m watching TV, or on the internet, my brain is active and I’m interacting in some way with what I’m watching/reading. However, we should be conscious about how much time we spend on screens instead of interacting with the people around us.

Yahoo then and now

After reading the 2012 Pew Research Report "Future of the Internet, Millennials" and looking at The Internet Archive: Wayback Machine (http://archive.org/web/), I showed my 10 year old son yahoo.com today (https://www.yahoo.com/) and what it looked like in 1996. He said the 1996 version did not have very much information, it was boring because it had no pictures, and that it looked unreliable to him. He said he would be much more likely to use the 2016 version because it showed news, had more information, and he felt like it would be more reliable because of the ads. He said ads mean the website is making money, and it would have to be reliable for people to pay to put the ads there.

Like the report discusses, my son has grown up on the internet. (He learned his abc’s from an online game when he was 18 months old- the website is still up and surprisingly still the same http://www.fisher-price.com/en_US/GamesandActivities/onlinegames/the-abcs-zoo-learning-game). I thought it was really interesting that he said the 1996 Yahoo did not seem to have much information. In 1996, that was a huge amount of information on one page, but as the report discusses, people who are “hyperconnected” have vastly different expectations about how much information should be available to them.

I was not surprised that he said it looked boring. (Like the article says, people who grew up on the internet want to be constantly entertained.) However, I was surprised that he used advertisements as a way to make judgments about whether a website is reliable or not. The fact that he is trying to evaluate the reliability of a website shows some sophistication of thought about the internet. He already knows you can’t trust everything you read on the internet.

American Idol

Say what you will, but I’m an American Idol fan. I cheered on Kelly Clarkson when she won the first season and laughed with the guy who sang “Pants on the Ground.” I’ve been watching the last season and I’m sad it’s the last one. I think it’s been so popular because everyone can imagine themselves on that stage. America loves a good Cinderella story.  This article http://realitytvmagazine.sheknows.com/2006/04/26/why-is-american-idol-so-popular/

says perhaps one reason it was so popular is because “American viewers get the reward of knowing that they and not some suit in an office somewhere have created the next American superstar.”  Our chapter last week about active audiences is so relevant to this show. The audience sees the contestants as one of them and they are able to interact with the show and vote on the outcome.  

As culture has changed, American Idol has changed as well.  In the first few seasons, Simon Cowell was a judge and he was known for being mean to contestants who did not sing very well. He would say things like “you should sue your voice coach” and then the person would walk out the door and the judges would all laugh at them. With the new focus against bullying, that part of the show has been toned down significantly. The current judges will say things like “I’m sorry, this show is not for you” instead of making fun of people. Here’s an article from 2012 about American Idol making money by bullying people http://www.npr.org/2012/06/20/155358188/facing-up-to-bullies-everywhere-but-on-reality-tv.

What do you think about American Idol?