Is Binge Watching Really the Way You Should be Watching Television?

If you have Netflix, HBO Go, Hulu, or any television streaming website, you know how it feels to binge watch a TV show. There comes a point in the level of binge watching where you should ask yourself, "Is this healthy?".

Where binge watching can't directly effect your health, it's best not to try and over do it. This way of viewing TV shows is kind of like being hooked on drugs, you get addicted and there's no way you're not going to push the button for next episode when it appears.

But there's another question that comes along with this style of television, are you really appreciating the show? If you watch so much of one show at a time there is a point where you will get distracted or become disinterested in what you are seeing. Are these TV streaming websites taking suspense and drama out of TV shows? There's no waiting anymore, you can automatically click on a button to see what is happening next.

Netflix is definitely taking over the television scene and there is no way that it's going to stop. People spend hours and days of their lives watching continuous television and missing out on the "reality" of the world. They are stuck in this virtual world which can ultimately lead to them regretting the decisions that they made to binge watch television. They do this to be caught up with the times, or to watch that one popular show that they missed out on. Either way that you look at it, binge watching television online is hindering the lives of people and their health. There is no looking back now, and we will walk forward in this digitally infused, binge watching obsessed world.

Pretty Little Liars

This show is way more than it seems at first glance. There are people who are alive that should be dead, there are bad guys who are actually good, good guys who are actually bad, so many turns that my head hurts just trying to piece it together. Although I think the story is being dragged out a little too much, I am very curious to see how the writers tie up all these loose ends.

My current issue with this show is that it has turned away from the secret observer pulling strings story line. We haven't seen "A" in action in a long time and it just doesn't seem right. The Liars haven't received anonymous texts or notes or strange packages. Now that they think they have figured out who it is (I'm not sure I believe it's who they think it is) A has almost entirely left them alone with the exception of providing Spencer with pills after she promises her family she will stop.

One thing I really appreciate about this show is how they portray the mental states of the girls when they go through these traumatic situations. When Aria finds out that Ezra was using her to write her story she becomes very numb and empty. Spencer's addiction to the pills plus the stress she is under is very well done. Even the way her character looks physically on screen is accurate to what a girl in her situation would look like.  I feel like some of the topics in this show could be sort of touchy for some viewers and I believe that the show has handled them with a lot of class.

The Power of Drill Baby, Drill!

If games and virtual environments were not critically influential in "educating" people by drilling into their brain and responsive system whatever message we wish to convey, then we would not spend so much money, time, research etc. in such medium. But the fact is that...

"Manhunt 2" is a video game in which characters kill
and torture using items such as a fuse box and a toilet.

Photo Credit:

Rockstar Games Via Associated Press
Related Article:
Study Links Violent Video Games, Hostility

Think before you click

Google's data center, from Harper's magazine, March 2008

This blueprint depicts Google's data center, code named "02 PROJECT" at The Dalles, Oregon.

Google and its nemesis, Microsoft, Yahoo and Ask.com went there lured by the cheapest electricity in North America. And they need it. They are building gigantic server farms on the banks of the Columbia River.

We tend to think of the internet, the virtual worlds, our email and the "paperless society" as somehow a 'cleaner' option than the legacy of our ancestors. We talk of information and the exchange of ideas, as if these concepts reside on the sphere of intangibles that lead us to a gentler, greener world.

People are slowly realizing that driving their cars and SUV's leave a carbon "footprint" for which we will be hold accountable by generations to come. So we telecommute, we email instead of writing a letter or a note (would we write so much dribble if we had to use pen and ink?) and we search or, using the new verb, we google for information, sometimes for its own sake, the new addiction.

Little do we realize that this new industry is as heavy as they come, and like the article in Harper's 1 mentions: "...an energy glutton that is only growing hungrier." Currently Google is estimated to have in the order of a million servers. According to the article: "...the servers require a half-watt in cooling for every watt they use in processing". Some simple math will yield in the order of 103 megawatts for the Dalles plant alone. As a curious note, the Northwest Aluminum smelter across the street form the data center once used 85 megawatts before falling under soaring energy costs.

If you examine the blueprint above, you will see that 18,800 sq. ft. are devoted to the "cooling towers". Perhaps it will become fashionable again to wear the Top Hats of the 1920's to celebrate the new Information Chimneys of the New Millenium?

Can you identify the gentleman in the picture?
C'mon, I'll buy pizza for the first to name him!

And the winner is...Takumi! Choose your toppings (**>

While you are at it, look at the building on the upper right corner and you will see a suggestive label: "Transient Employee Dormitory Building". As with all things digital, employees are simply bits and blips in the flow of the new oil. And the "carbon footprint" is not pretty.

The article mentions that in 2006 American data centers "consumed more power than American televisions" and that in all locations currently active or in planning, both in America and Siberia, Shanghai and Dublin where AT&T, Microsoft and Google are heading in search (pun intended) of even cheaper electricity, most of this energy is produced by the burning of fossil fuels. I gives new meaning to the term "cloud computing"


1 The Harper's article "KEYWORD:EVIL, Google's addiction to cheap electricity", which inspired this post, was written by Ginger Strand, author of Inventing Niagara: Beauty, Power and Lies, to be published this spring by Simon & Schuster

Mixed Realities

I think that this and other examples illustrate quite well a quote I read recently by Richard Purcell (former chief privacy officer at Microsoft) stating that "Technology is way ahead of our ability as a society to think about the consequences"

On a related note (everything is related, I know) an article in the Washington Post about the recent annual Toy Fair in NY, dated February 20, 2008; p.C01 says:

Fact: Kids create more than 100,000 avatars each day in virtual communities such as Habbo and Club Penguin. That startling statistic has broad implications for how kids play and what the $22 billion toy industry wants to sell them to play with.

...For the (toy) industry, which uses this four-day play date to hawk its current and upcoming products, here's the best-case scenario: Kids won't want to stop playing in their online worlds. With the ever-expanding child obesity problem, that also is the worst-case scenario.

Of course, worst-case scenarios make for some of the best business opportunities (e.g. 9/11). That is why you see and will see more and more, a strong linkage from RL to VR as you already have with toys such as Build-a-Bear which uses the virtual world, where children play a controlled fantasy using an avatar of their toy bear, to model their consumer behavior (and their parent's) therefore bouncing back to RL where the child now sees his/her bear as lacking those things which they so easily get online.

More worrying to me is the fact that those kids forfeit their imaginary role and fantasy playing by succumbing to a pre-canned experience. This might have implications for the development of true free-form creativity in the child. And no matter how emphatically the toy companies insist their "privacy policy" protects your children, the fact is that kids activities online are closely monitored by those same companies, so that while individual privacy might be moderately protected (very weakly I would argue) their group as a whole becomes a very vulnerable and exploited target.