Keep Your Alternatives off My TV!

Keep Your Alternatives off My TV! by Roxanne McDonald

Alternative TV might be the next step towards the future: its interactivity factor might also be setting a dangerous precedent.

From what I just caught from a TV commercial this week, television viewers will very soon be able to interact with certain programs, taking, as is the premise of the ad, control of their televisions…rather than engage in otherwise passive entertainment.

According to Cory Bergman of LostRemote, Channel 101.com, Vh1, and Jack Black are collaborating on Acceptable TV, whereby viewers/users upload a three- minute mini show, which is edited in with a “professional” show and aired as a complete piece. More interactivity comes at a second level, whereby users/viewers vote to keep or kill particular shows.

The good side of this future-is-here TV is that one, again, people can get off their passive asses and participate in their own television experiences; and two, those who do submit are said to get a “cut of the ad revenues” for the week their pieces air.

Okay, so it’s reality TV; it’s viewer-driven, or controlled, with the voting; and it calls for submissions of work.
Three characteristics already in existence.

And, okay, absolutely no offense to Jack Black, who is one of the finest minds in the entertainment field today….

So “Acceptable TV” is going the way of the future—not introducing it, just furthering its techno-culture, picking up on what Ray Bradbury first offered, for example, in Fahrenheit 451.

But if you read that book and/or saw the movie, you saw what a mockery was this so-called interactive TV: Linda Montag hurries back to her television screens, where “The Family” comes on and asks for Linda’s input as one of the characters. However, the two TV personalities are not as much interacting with her as they are performing in spite of her. They have a scripted dialogue, then ask Linda what she thinks (the answer which they of course cannot hear), so as she stammers and coyly blushes, they say, “Very good idea, Linda!” or something similar–which just highlights the mediocrity and ignorance of the stay-at-home wife type who is out of the loop of reality, really, points out the pitiful state of people addicted to drugs and the media and even points a critical finger at the absurdity of the so-called advancements of television.

Regardless of whether we are moving toward a Bradburian vision, or are close to ending up with a posse/mob mentality (in throwback to Rome or the wild, wild West) or the victim of the posse that is the future audience — ala The Running Man, I don’t want to interact with my TV. I spend all day interacting, and my impetus for watching TV involves getting away from anyone with whom I would have to interact. And that’s everyone.

I don’t want to control my shows (beyond muting them or making them go away by changing the channel). I don’t want to control my shows any more than I want to control my books. If we wanted to control our books, our fiction, our fairy tales, we’d write them. If we wanted to control shows to the degree to which the ads for “Acceptable TV” imply, we’d be writing them. Oh, we (the common

TV-viewing public) can’t do that? We aren’t television writers, you cry?!?
Exactly.

We can’t write the shows, we are not capable of creating the next CSI: Miami or Big Brother or Survivor, really, so why would we want to watch what others are equally incapable of writing or creating?

Okay, I’ll probably get curious, then fascinated, then hooked, and will have to retract…. But in the meantime, I am still very wary.

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