The Personal Television Revolution Is Horrifying — And Brilliant
It’s right and healthy that members of a family or other group indulge their own preferences. But the balance between individualism and communalism seems off, particularly in households saturated with mobile devices and digital media (which these days is a huge chunk of them).
I thought — hoped, really — that I was worrying too much about new technology, so I called Patricia Greenfield, Distinguished Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles. I asked: Do tech-savvy people in healthy relationships (like, say, me) really need to worry that customized media and mobile devices will undermine our connections with others?
“I think you should worry,” Greenfield told me.
As techniques to distribute and personalize television proliferate, then, expect to see a parallel rise in coping mechanisms. The systems we create to replace the emotional effects of communal television should be at least as interesting as the technology that disrupted family TV in the first place.