Digital Sextant

Reaching for the Remote*

Avery recently learned to use the remote.  She’s been building up to it for a while now, able to turn off the television by pushing the red button at the top.  Finn knows to point the remote at the television too.  It’s appalling and cute at the same time.

But just recently, Jenny was busy and Avery was watching Merry Madagascar on the TiVO, so when she wanted Jenny to pause it so she could go to the bathroom, Jenny just said “Push the yellow button and it will stop.”  When Avery got back from the bathroom, all hell broke loose, remote-usingly speaking.  Avery moved from pause-unpause to fast-forwarding, rewinding, pushing the “eight second back” button, and so on.  She started picking and choosing from Merry Madagascar, watching the segment where the four animals open their presents over and over, rewinding to the part where the little girl falls down the stairs, fast forwarding to something else.  I was working on the kitchen ceiling at the time, so I listened to the distinctive bleep-bloop of the TiVO and pondered new media.

Here’s my daughter, not yet four, remixing a television show, within twenty minutes of learning to use the remote.  Sure, she’s just watching her favorite parts, but she’s also making use of the affordances of the medium.  TiVO affords watching one segment over and over; it affords leaving out the commercials (“I hate ‘ommercials” she says, ever her Daddy’s girl); it demands remix.  If she could add in Dora and Batman from Scooby Doo, I know she would.

She’s growing up in a world where she starts movies from the beginning (“Daddy, can we start NEMO from the part with the sharks?”), and our current conception of what should and should not be allowed for that media will be alien to her in ways I can hardly conceive.  As Lawrence Lessig says, “Common sense revolts.”

* Photo by MarkKelly, distributed under Attr-Sharealike-NonCom license