Time-Shifting Is a Mortgage on My Future : Videotaping: Nothing’s free, including the obligation we build up to watch all the stuff we taped while we slept or partied.
It was just 15 years ago this month that the first bulky Sony Betamax consumer videocassette recorder was introduced in the United States. It cost $2,295 and had a recording capability of one hour. Those numbers have improved since then, of course, and now 65% of American homes own VCRs for the simple but compelling reason that they help us control the video revolution, and we love them for it.
But nothing’s free, especially what we love. Just what have 15 years of vigorous interfacing with VCRs done to our psychology? I wish I knew. All I can say is what they’ve done to mine. Here, then, is my Top 10 List of ways VCRs have been hazardous to my health:
10) They create the illusion of consequence-free living, then make me pay for it. “Time-shifting” just mortgages my own future to pay for double-dipping today. But at a restaurant, almost hearing my VCR whir “Twin Peaks” into readiness, I continue to believe I’m living two lives and getting away with it.
9) VCRs let me tape while I sleep, so I can keep in touch with David Letterman, yet still be nodding into dreamland by 11. Ah, what a wonderful world! Until I realize that not only has my waking self been taping future obligations, but my unconscious mind has, too. The more I sleep, the behinder I get.
8) Well, hey, I just won’t watch it all, right? But taping something and then not watching it creates cognitive dissonance and the guilt of not living up to my own best expectations of myself. After all, I’m the one who taped that “Nova” overview of battlefield deception technology, the National Geographic special on Bali, the five-part series on skyscrapers. Time to get after it, pal.
7) Eventually, with so much on tape and yet unwatched, I become reclusive and uncommunicative for fear of discovering the score of the Reds-Dodgers game I just taped or who the devil Mickey Rourke is chasing in “Angel Heart.” So my loaded VCR makes me not free, but trapped.
6) I find myself eager to watch on tape movies that I shunned at the local theaters, thus settling into a second-rate videoville where I watch Jane Fonda and Gregory Peck in “Old Gringo,” for example, not because it’s a good film (it isn’t), but because it’s “fresh” as a video.
5) Sooner or later I tape over stuff I meant to save. This makes me seem not only stupid but crass, when, for example, I tell friends I taped a tennis match over Pavarotti or ran “Pee Wee’s Big Adventure” right over Olivier’s “King Lear.”
4) “Live” no longer has any meaning whatsoever. Somebody’s “live” is somebody else’s Sawyer and Sam Donaldson on “Prime Time Live” don’t have their intended effect because I don’t believe they’re live.
3) Zipping and zapping with the remote control switch takes my already short attention span and teaches me to make it even shorter. I want to zip slow moments in life and aim my pointer at talkative friends, hurrying them to their point. Having become God in a very small space, I am petulant about my lack of control elsewhere.
2) One VCR makes me want two. Thus good sense slides into addiction. Now I can tape tapes, watch one thing and tape another, tape two things while watching a third, watch nothing but tape everything. My tape library can pile up my options all the way to the sky and into the next decade, if I wish, like the phone calls that I may or may not answer piling up on my phone recorder right now. I learn to disappear inside my machinery.
And the No. 1 reason why VCRs are hazardous to my health:
1) They make me want to buy a camcorder, tape my own life, and do to it what I did to TV. I long to sit in the studio audience of “America’s Funniest Home Videos,” have my video of my dog chasing a ball out the upstairs window judged the funniest, win the $10,000, and then rush home to watch myself on my VCR. I dream of watching myself watching myself watching myself, if you know what I mean, and I just know you do.
