When I was a kid we had about 7 maybe 8 television channels (I grew up somewhere between rabbit ears and cable). It was easy then to decide what to watch or if to watch at all. Today though I can have options of up to 650 channels. Do I need that many? No. Are most worth my time? No. But I will experiment and give some a chance. If I find value, they stay in my line up. If not they are quickly removed. I learn which channels present the best content, consistently and some I just visit from time to time. Some I’ve never selected based on title alone; just not of interest to me. New channels appear and others disappear, I make room when I can. This is not difficult even with hundreds of channels to choose from. To me that number could be 60,000 and I feel no stress in the fact that I can’t watch them all or that I’ll miss something important.
We know what moves us. We know what we need or want. We learn and can separate the good from the bad. We find something we treasure and we tune in. We talk to our friends, those people who’s opinions we trust, and get their take on different programs and make choices from that. Who have you ever heard say TV is information overload or that they were suffering from a form of TV filter failure? Online time is the new TV time and yes, it’s all the time but we have choices. And yet people speak of too much information, unreliable content, and going down rabbit holes online but not of television. I find it interesting that the technology parallels of broadcasting ideas and opinions are eerily similar, yet the societal complaints aren’t at all.
