People often pay cable TV so they can have the freedom to choose the channels they want to watch. Technology drove cable TV a little further and gave us TiVo so we could be able to watch whatever we wanted whenever we needed. The freedom of choice was upgraded to a timeless choice; once a promised made by the good old video recorder technology. But, what makes TiVo so different from a video recorder?
The answer is simple: on-demand. There it is, everywhere we look we find it, from traffic alerts directly delivered to your cellphones to IBM ads. Everything has the on-demand label on it. It is trendy, it is cool and so it appears to be to from romance to television. Everything we need, whenever we need just one simple click away.
Unfortunately, people does not recognize that freedom is also defined by the American Merriam-Webster dictionary as the absence of necessity, coercion, or constraint in choice or action, meaning that complete freedom would be not only watching the TV programs we desire wherever we want but building our own programs, according to our own preferences and taste. Obviously such a thing still is impossible – with or without TiVo.
So, next time you sit in front a TV Set and hold the remote control on your hands be aware that all the freedom you have between MTV and HBO is nothing more than a constructed reality, the false impression of control. Your are constrained to a limited array of possibilities and the remote control has no control at all over the choices someone else already made for you.
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