Technology is amazing. Just 10 years ago, if I had wanted to watch television, I would have had to drag myself into the living room, find the remote control, find a place to sit on the couch, turn the TV on, and find something to watch on only 36 channels of cable television. The picture was great, but the sound quality was mediocre at best.
Now, with the advent of the Internet, I can, with the aid of my $1,000 laptop computer and $50 Internet access, enjoy television from the comfort of my $79 Office Depot secretarial chair. True, the picture's a lot smaller and the quality's a bit granier (or as we say in the technology biz, more pixelated) than my old television, and sometimes the video just stops because the connection isn't fast enough. But the main point is that I'm watching TV on the Internet! How cool is that? It's the magic of the World Wide Web. Technology has made all sort of incredible things possible, and watching TV at my desk is just one of them.
Programming has improved substantially as well, at least in terms of quantity. First of all, I don't have to read any news, because now most of the news links or headlines lead to video feeds of news stories from cable TV. I can get the same high-quality, in-depth news coverage on my computer as I used to get on the best television cable channels. I'm no longer limited to network entertainment, and I'm no longer chained to the button-down primetime TV schedule. At any time of day, hell, even in the middle of the night, I can just bring up YouTube and watch thousands upon thousands of low-cost entertainment without all the pretensions of network TV.
The other day, someone also told me that you could listen to the radio on the Internet. Wow. I'm going to have to check that out. That would really save me a lot of time and money!
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You didn't know you could listen to the radio through the Internet? You know I would have missed many baseball games if not for the Internet since I teach evenings in the summer. I would also miss Heroes on Monday nights if I couldn't watch it on the Internet. Yes, technology is certainly beneficial to society, but what about the detriments, such as it breeds laziness in our students?
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