The idea of digital TV is sound. You get an ultra-pristine quality in image that is delivered without any analog fuzzies painted on your display screen. The image is flawless. Or is it?
When an analog TV has signal degradation, the image gets fuzzy. By fiddling with the rabbit ear antennae or with the mystical application of aluminum foil, the fuzz is often tamed. There are people that have a real knack for adjusting their TV antennae. There should be a TV show about them to tell their stories.
Digital TV does not degrade gracefully. When you've got a scratch on a DVD, you are in for real visual torture. The image skips unrelentlessly, strange digital amoeba crawl across the screen, and in the worst case all you see is an unintelligible digital storm.
At the airport, I think that CNN plots against us in the digital realm. I've seen countless digital fritz-ing on the airport TV sets. As I was getting on the airplane at La Guardia yesterday, there was a CNN reporter talking about how there is new medical evidence that watching a comedy movie versus a horror movie actually improves your blood vessel due to some positive effect of laughing. In the midst of a snowstorm and the eagerness to board, there was a moment where everyone at the gate froze in the middle of their busy-ess to see what the reporter was going to further elucidate about happiness. With most eyes glued and heads turned at the airport monitor, suddenly the broadcast was digitally scrambled! The world literally stopped at an awkward moment in a real-world 404 (File Not Found).
Machines conspiring to prevent us from being healthy and happy. Just a coincidence? I wish I could be sure.
Posted by maeda at March 9, 2005 03:24 AM