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Wednesday, April 23, 2003 |
"My cult is Amway"
Sunday's New York Times has an article on TiVO, focusing on the people who own them. It's good for the many quotes from TiVO owners, but not great owing to the usual tedious old media fear-mongering about any technology that allows you to avoid advertising. Yeah, my TiVO is sending records of my viewing habits back home, and I am accepting on trust that they are only releasing aggregate data. I'm a lot more worried about what my credit card company does with my purchasing habits, and credit card company "privacy" policies are far more weaselly about what they intend on doing. Here's an experiment: go to a grocery store. Use a credit card to buy pet food (if you have no pets) or diapers (if you don't have a baby in the house). Watch your junk mail and see how fast that purchase got sold to marketeers.To update the old stoner joke: If God made anything better, He's keeping it for Himself.
Mr. Rothenberg said that subscribing to TiVo had had an unintended effect. By skipping ads and filling his viewing time with documentaries and shows about gardening rather than the regularly scheduled fare, he took himself "outside of culture," he said. When friends joked about the ubiquitous Budweiser "Wazzup?" advertising campaign a couple of years back, Mr. Rothenberg said, he had no idea what they were talking about.
...there is something thrilling about being unshackled, at least partly, from a device that for years has had people at its mercy. Skipping ads and thumbing your nose at the scheduling structure imposed by corporate broadcasters feels, if not exactly revolutionary, at least titillating.
[Why TIVO Owners Can't Shut Up, via the Gizmodo]
