Television v/s Internet

These days I dont engage in television at all. I mean i dont know what to watch on it!! Funny.
But some time ago, my friend Ankit shared an interesting observation. The television is something that keeps on showing you images even when you dont ask for it. You switch it on and you have a plethora of choices for consuming any kind of image you want. This can actually be a two way thing. People can see TV, rather even stare at it for no reason and it will still keep on changing its content. Thus, probably it will keep you engaged, even if it's the most mundane way.

Ankit stays away from his home in this city. So he has no television to kill  his time at home. He feels bored sometimes. I told him: "Dude, you have the net, why do you worry? You can watch anything over there and now-a-days all TV stuff is available on you-tube"

Now this is the interesting part of the answer. He said: "Yes, but you have to search the internet for what you want. It doesnt give you things just without asking." Probably thats why we call TV the Idiot box - it's actually a transferred epithet. It makes you an idiot, without you knowing what you want to watch sometimes.

These days, I spend a lot of time with the internet digging out things, reading, collecting, putting different things together, talking to people, their ideas...and all that. And TV seems really futile to me. What this suggests is that not only I have become too focused with what I want to do, but it also suggests a shift in culture of spending time with an object. In this focus, I overlook a lot of things, which are a constant botheration to my father. My father is perpetually interested in knowing the current. And I keep telling him, the current is too distracting for me because I am interested in history! That may be very naiive answer right now. But I just avoid getting into a debate with him, particularly when I know I am going to lose over his wisdom that I does not approve of!

The fact that you have to know something to be able to use the internet as opposed to just staring at the TV which gives information for free (in a conceptual sense - ofcourse you pay your tv bill), was interesting.
In another conceptual sense, the television can be seen as a producer of a vast archive of societal constructs of images. It can become good amount of growing data for research in various subjects.

However, things will soon change when TV becomes digital. Then, everything will be available on the net and you can consider internet as another idiot box. And we shall then have infinite images strolling all around us with us not being able to decide where to invest our time...That will be absolute madness. That's not far really, we are almost on the verge of this technology taking over!

Why does my skepticism propound I don't know. What makes me insecure with this, I don't know...