benTV

A week ago tonight, we ordered Chinese delivery, as is our wont on Friday evenings. (We'll do so again tonight.) Nathalie forgot to ask for the total when she placed the order, so she filled out most of a check for me and left the amount blank so I could fill it in if the food arrived while she was tied up with baby care.

While I was filling out the check, the Chinese delivery guy asked, "You watch football?"

No.

Since I was looking down at the amount field on the check, I couldn't see his expression, but he followed up with, "Oh! NASCAR!"

Um, no. I handed him the check. Whatever he looked like before, at this point he was looking confused. I said, "We don't have a TV."

"Ohhhhhh," he said smiling and looking relieved. "So you very very spiritual!"

I have no idea why that exchange took place, but I tells it like it happens.

The thing that bugged me after he left (because I'm bugged by the kinds of things that bug no one else) is that it's not entirely true that we don't watch TV. We don't have cable, and the reception is terrible on the broadcast channels we might normally be drawn to. But 99% of what we rent from Netflix is stuff produced for television, and we do watch DVDs almost every night.

But I think Netflix is on its way out, at least as we currently know it. I'm beginning to suspect that DVDs will seem quaint to Benben when he's old enough to think that things seem quaint. They'll be part of the history of technology, like those big arch-shaped radios, black-and-white television, and 8-track tapes (and audio cassettes, and VHS, and so and so forth...)

We watch the NBC show Heroes, but we buy it from iTunes. Now I discover that the major broadcast TV networks are streaming their most recent episodes on the web. Competition is even driving them to do more: NBC has an animated series of spoofs called "Pale Force" that it only shows online and CBS is even streaming "Meet the Papdits" -- a pilot for a series they did not pick up a couple years ago, but might now be reconsidering as its writer and producer is finding success with the new Borat movie.

Most of the Americans in my parents' generation grew up with TV, but some of my childhood peers still had parents who told them, "When I was your age, we didn't have television ..."

How will I explain television to Benjamin? Our current thinking is to keep him away from TV and videos until he's at least 2 years old (based in part on research that correlates attention-deficit issues with babies watching television). I've been starting a children's section of our DVD library, but for all I know, his main experience of video will be on computers.

In a world of on-demand video -- a world where the very concept of "online" might seem perverse, since offline will be the exception -- what sense will he be able to make of the idea that we once had to (ahem, I mean chose to) adjust our lives to a broadcast schedule. I'm not even sure commercial interruptions will make any sense to him.

- papa