Day: December 8, 2007

internet pop culture

Almost every time I hang out with a friend they drop some line on me like “have you seen this commercial?” or “did you watch the last episode of…?”.

The answer is usually no. I am almost completely removed from American pop culture. If you read my post titled, cancel your cable, you will like it, then you know that I have been cable free since Feb 2007. The results of this are strange and exciting, with some positive and negative aspects to it.

The negative first. I am somewhat removed from my friends and the average person. I can’t strike up that casual conversation with folks over pop culture that I used to, sometimes I miss that common ground… I also miss key tv events, like sports games on cable-only channels, music events on MTV, and other “special” pop culture moments.

Really, though, that is it. Everything else has been a boon to my life. I have more free time, I save money by avoiding the 100 dollar cable bill, and I avoid the always annoying commercial spam.

The free time does give me a chance to write more, which i love, but I still miss good content. For that I have turned to internet pop culture. On the net, I can watch full episodes of lots of tv shows, I can keep up with news, and there are even internet celebrities. And, more and more content is popping up. I can get content from the pro sources like ESPN, NBC, Comedy Central and user generated sources like audio/video podcasts and youtube.

At this point, I have all that I need and more. I love my new internet pop culture in all its nerdy goodness.

I hope to share this goodness with you through my delicious bookmarks tagged with swordplaytv and tvnews. Take a look below and feel free to share your bookmarks with me using that tag too:

+ Add me to your delicious network

[rsslist:http://del.icio.us/rss/tag/swordplaytv]

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[rsslist:http://del.icio.us/rss/tag/swordplaytvnews]

TV Commercials are Spam

Do you know what commercial spam is?

No guessing needed, this term is pretty simple. It is the 30+ commercials you get for every 30 minutes of tv viewed. Of course, those 30 commercials are not new and unique they are the same ones, over and over again. If you watch an hour of tv then it is doubled.

Next, throw in the commercials that are local and usually lower quality. Add-in the unspoken agreement to run commercials all at the same time, so you can’t avoid them. Finally, to top it off, the increased volume of the commercials (sorry, doesn’t relate to spamming, but it still annoys!).

To me that rings of the word spam, but let’s do some research to determine this:

  • Spamming is the abuse of electronic messaging systems to indiscriminately send unsolicited bulk messages. [1] (wikipedia)
  • Spam: To send (a message) indiscriminately to multiple mailing lists, individuals, or newsgroups. [2] (answers.com)
  • Spam: Unsolicited usually commercial e-mail sent to a large number of addresse. [3] (miriam-websters)

Yep, it fits. A few exceptions could be made because it is not sent through email and somebody could argue that commercials are solicited.But, really, tv sends out commercial spam.