Media Mindfulness

Last weekend I was at the ACME media activist conference giving a workshop on eco-media and had a chance to hang out with Mitch Altman, creator of the most awesome stocking stuffer, TV-B-Gone. This week he was also on WBAI’s “Off the Hook” (a hacktivist radio program) talking about his innovative product. Essentially, Mitch is a countercultural geek who designed a remote control that has only one function: turning off televisions. There are 150 codes programmed into it and it can pretty much turn off any TV except some of the newer, bigger flat screens. One story he tells concerns how CNN caught wind of his device and as a preventative measure encased all their airport TVs (they are the sole provider in US airports) with wood cases. Not to worry, you can point the TV-B-Gone right into the box and it will do its thing. Kudos to Mitch for forcing CNN into such countermeasures.

One can imagine that in the future it will be a crime to not watch TV, but for now it’s perfectly legal to turn them off, and people generally react positively to TVs getting zapped. I’m sure you’re like me in that it’s utterly baffling why TVs are on in public spaces when the point of being in public is to engage other human beings. The most annoying thing to happen while you are talking is having TVs catch your eye, even when you don’t want to watch them. The problem is that your brain processes the change in environment (such as scene edits which look like flashes), immediately drawing it to your attention. This is great for advertisers but has little benefit for the average person. Keeping in mind the advertising secret that once an image is put in your head you can’t take it out, you are doing a pubic service by randomly (and intentionally) turning off TVs.

Incidentally, during my conference workshop I mentioned that I don’t watch TV because it makes me depressed. This elicited a somewhat hostile reaction from several in the group of media activists who wondered how I could do my work as a media critic without watching TV. Simple. I did a scientific study of my behavior and found that when I watch TV, I feel like crap. One astute teacher has her students do an exercise where students are asked to watch one hour of TV (on the same channel) and than sit in nature for an hour and to compare the experiences. If you haven’t tried this, I suggest doing so. (This is based on a book by Bill McKibben, Age of Missing Information, in which he compares 24 hours of TV with 24 hours of nature.) Still, I wonder if it’s bad epistemology to separate nature from technology. I’m still working on this problem; intuitively I think it’s a false dichotomy.

As far as work is concerned, it’s not hard to find media to analyze; it’s everywhere. However, I’m not as pure as I position myself. I do download the few shows that I actually like (such as Lost) and I watch baseball (much to the great astonishment of my friends and colleagues). Still, of all the subjects I speak about, talking about turning off TV tends to draw the most ire. Not surprisingly, kids who are restricted from media use tend to react like addicts whose drugs had been withheld. Still, I’m sensing that kids are getting bored with TV. I closed the session by saying something kinda mean: that TV in the future will only be for affluent suburbanites scared of terrorists. But, for now, I’ll stand by that.

To purchase TV-G-Gone, click on the link below. It will make lots of people happy!

“Tv-b-gone” (Cornfield Electronics)