From robust to fragile systems.
May 15th, 2009
My whole life I’ve been watching t.v.
For the past several years my household has had no cable or satellite, just plain old terrestrial broadcast television. Last year, because our old t.v. was on its last legs and because we were looking ahead to this year’s changeover to all-digital transmission, we bought a new set. Beautiful, big, crystal-clear. Lovely.
Yet tonight, because it’s windy out, the signals from the networks keep cutting in and out. The digital tuner is touchy: if the signal breaks up even a little, the picture freezes and the sound skips like a CD with a scratch on it. Any choppier, and the t.v. reverts to its default screen, which is quite an attractive collection of shades of blue, and which helpfully informs us . . . that there’s no good signal.
When the signal does come in loud and clear, it’s terrific — much better than the old way ever was. But those analog signals never cut out altogether if the weather was anything less than a gale.
I’m the last thing from a Luddite. But the members of the Lead Pencil Club had a point: sometimes the old stuff is more robust.
It’s worth a pause to consider what we give up when we rush to embrace the new.
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(Photo by Michael Fajardo, used under a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND license.)