My apartment complex switched its cable provider last week. The new cable folks came in, switched out the old cable box and put in theirs. They also took my old DVR. I have to go pick up my new one from the new cable company’s offices. I haven’t gotten around to it yet.
Unexpected side effect: I read a lot more now.
It’s not that I don’t have cable TV anymore. I do. It’s just that I no longer have 200 hours of my favorite shows, taped and indexed and accessible at any time. There seems to be so little value in turning on that picture box and staring at whatever happens to be taking place on one of the 9000 channels, especially since 80% of the time it’s a commercial and only 0.05% of the time is it Girl Meets Gown.
I was an early adopter of TiVo, and I always argued that DVRs wouldn’t make people watch more TV; they would just allow people to watch TV more efficiently. I may have just disproved my own point.
(Side note: In 2005, one of my business professors told the class that TiVo was an unsustainable, essentially undifferentiated business model and that the company would be irrelevant in five years, once the DVR concept had been adopted by the mass market. We all gasped. We made arguments against his point for an hour. His position was unthinkable. TiVo was God. This is why he was the professor and we were the students. It’s a lesson I’ve seen played out time and again now in disruptive technology: Don’t be the company that trains the market.)
Anyway. I’m reading Emily Gould’s And the Heart Says Whatever. She’s brillz and I love her. During her Gawker days, she mainstreamed the genre of the overshare, a style of writing I’ve practiced professionally for several years now. Emily still does it better than anyone. If you enjoy reading SIAM — or if you liked the early days of Evil Beet when it was still 50% gossip, 50% my wretched, early-20s personal life — you’ll love this book.
And, hey, if you’re one of those people who lurks on my websites and occasionally leaves bitter, anonymous comments about how I don’t need to discuss every miniscule, navel-gazing thought in my head with the entire world, please read Emily’s book. It will explode your head and then you won’t be able to comment here anymore. AND THEN EVERYONE WINS.
Oh, no, wait. Emily and I win. You lose.
