Taking Time and Effort out of the Equation

Things have been a little crazy around here the last few weeks. I'm trying to finish up my work on Legacy of the Dragons, doing some reworking on a story for Children of the Rune, coordinating with my co-authors on Beyond Countless Doorways, figuring out what's going to go into Book of Hallowed Might II, judging the entrants to the Diamond Throne/Arcana Unearthed character creation contest, and doing some planning with Sue regarding some future products. I took some time off around the holidays, and, well-now I'm paying the price.

About the only breaks I've given myself in January have been to run my campaign and to watch a DVD or a show on television.

About two months ago, we got TiVo. If you haven't heard of it, TiVo allows you to record television programs digitally, and searches for programs for you based on title, actor, or subject matter. So, for example, I don't have to remember to tape 24 every week, it just does it automatically. Further, Sue can tell TiVo that she likes documentaries about the Mayas, or medieval life, and it records all relevant programs.

TiVo came out about three years ago, but it was an innovation I ignored. I figured, I can tape things now. However, TiVo's already completely changed the way I think of television-for the better. It no longer matters to me what time a show comes on. In fact, there are shows that I literally do not know when they come on. For example, I'd never seen the Justice League cartoons on Cartoon Network, because I simply couldn't be bothered to figure out when they were on and try to catch them. Now, TiVo does it for me. I still don't know when they're broadcast, but whenever I feel like watching an episode, they're recorded for me. (And since TiVo allows me to skip over commercials, a half hour episode only takes about 20 minutes to watch.)

We were told by people who had TiVo that it would make us watch less TV, because we wouldn't ever sit down to watch TV "just to see what was on." However, I almost never did that. Truth be told, TiVo has gotten us to watch more TV, because there's more on of interest than we ever paid any attention to. Lots of great documentaries, for example, are out there that we never knew about. Ditto with some shows that I knew I liked but rarely saw (like The Daily Show or Futurama). It's already allowed me to see some movies that I enjoyed but didn't know to look for, because I put in actors' names I liked.

I recently read something by a guy who had had TiVo long enough so that his young daughter doesn't remember TV before TiVo. When they are watching a television that's not at their house, she'll ask to watch a specific show, but of course she can't get it because the TV doesn't have TiVo. He tried to explain that to her, but she couldn't wrap her mind around the idea of watching TV as someone else dictates rather than watching what you want when you want it. Eventually, he had to tell her that the TV without TiVo was broken so she'd understand. It's an interesting preview of the future of entertainment, I think.

It's like how the Internet has changed my life and the way I think. With a high-speed connection and Google at my beck and call, I no longer even consider the possibility that there's a question I can't answer. When Sue comes home from running errands, and she's heard a new song on the radio that she likes, even if she only remembers a snippet of lyrics, I just go to the computer and find out the song and artist. No more wondering "who sings that one song," or "who's that one guy in that movie?" If I need to know how long a boa constrictor can get or what happened in Botswana today, I can get that information instantly.

What a huge change these little things have made in my life. What a huge change such access to entertainment and information have made in the way I think about things. It's surprising how quickly I've adapted to the convenience of it all.

It's like a whole new way of equating time (and perhaps hassle) with information (and entertainment), in that no longer does the latter require much of the former. Compare this to just 25 to 30 years ago, when television usually meant just a few channels, and if you didn't see a movie when it first came out you'd have to wait until one of the three networks decided to play it, if ever. If you weren't home when they broadcast an episode of your favorite shows, you just simply missed them. Information access depended on how far you lived from a well-stocked library or if you had a set of encyclopedias at home. News came at 6:00 or 11:00, or from a newspaper.

Now go back 100 years. Looking for some entertainment? Hope that someone's putting on a play, or sit at home and entertain yourself. If you don't live in a major city, you might never even see a library in your lifetime, and it's fairly certain you don't have access to an encyclopedia. If you've got a question, you'd better hope a friend who lives nearby knows the answer. You can get your news from a newspaper, but news from across the country might be days old by the time you learn of it, and you might never learn about something happening in another country.

My point? Well, if I have one it's that our access to information, and the convenience of that access, is accelerating at an incredible rate. I'm not an old guy, and I have seen it drastically change in my lifetime. And as our access changes, our view of information changes, in both good and bad ways. Bad, because I think it cheapens it. It's easy to be entertained or informed today, so we appreciate it less (and, because there's so much more of it, more of it is garbage, which perpetuates our thinking less of it). Good, because we as individuals have a greater degree of control. With more options being made available to me (what I want, when I want it), I'm no longer limited by the whims of some suits at a television network, a newspaper office, or even a library (are their suits in a library?) for my entertainment, information, or news. I have access to the information I want, and not just the information someone wants to give me, when they want to give it to me.

Of course, the question remains, with all these advancements saving me so much time, why am I still so busy?