Cnet news is reporting that GE will join the HDTV marketplace in 2009 with a television that will have advanced web technologies without the need for a PC.
Owners of the new TVs will be able to download widgets and other services to enhance their viewing experience.
GE's venture into the TV-making industry exemplifies the constant consumer-need for information. Unlike the internet, television programming was controlled by someone other than the user - consumers had to wait for information to be transmitted.
With internet-enabled televisions -- as well as "On-Demand" services -- users no longer need to wait for their information. You can go and get it.
Going along with the topic of innovation, different models of the new TVs will feature built-in Blu-ray players and the ability to connect wireless speakers to the unit.
"GE brand to grace Internet-ready TVs in 2009"
-Matt Mesa
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The streamlined convenience of such developments with TV's, and how viewers use them, has indeed been a longtime goal for the many industries related to cross-platform applications. The transformation of the conventional TV monitor and broadcast to now increasingly accommodate customized, Internet user-selected content streams is really something. And it was inevitable.
We can imagine the positives of these changes. But I also have a larger societal and cultural concern about how much more of a "boob tube" the TV will now become. I.e., if it can give us SO MUCH of what we individually want, in terms of entertainment especially, then how much more passive and addicted will users become in revolving their time, their lives, around the TV? Just look at how much our lives and daily habits have changed because of the computer.
This would seem to raise an especial concern regarding children, and also reinforce already bad habits among adult couch potatoes -- a population that is increasingly passive and dulled to independent critical thinking.
So, once again, it's a question of whether the technology itself is fostering "bad" habits, or whether people are abusing technology because other multiple sociological/cultural factors are not offering a healthy balance.
I, for one, would just like to see people talking more with each other again, face to face, or reading, or walking and playing around their neighborhood, getting to know each other as individuals. Sadly, the art and pleasure of stimulating conversation is gone. Reading and reading levels are demonstrably down (people who read are people who think). And the practice of polite yet complex, subtle social interchange is rapidly being lost.
Without such a balance, real communities suffer or remain undeveloped in apathy. And a healthy democracy of active, informed, truly one-on-one "connected" citizens is vastly diminished.
I love cool technology. But a larger set of values and perspectives keeps me from being a slave to it. I actively define what technology does for me, the limits to which I use it, and why. Not the other way around. It's a balance that I wish was more prevalent -- where the "virtual" communities we engage in are balanced by the real ones we should be a lively, dynamic part of. Whether we see it or not, that's a reality of consequences we can't deny for very long.
- Misako M.
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