Digital TV: A solitary experience?

Yesterday one of my fellow TV Scoop writers was musing on the possibilities for future digital channels, and the question focused my mind on the incredible diversity of television output that's available every evening (not to mention daytime) now at the flip of a remote. It's so very different from the first viewing experience of a sizeable proportion of the viewing public, myself included, for whom the advent of BBC2 increased their viewing choice by 50% and the arrival of Channel 4 represented a radical change in programming - so much so that it took several years to be properly assimilated into the viewing habits of the majority.

So different, yes, but is it better? When choices were limited, television was an activity for the whole family, and although what was on offer may not have been your first preference, there was usually something worth sitting in front of which would provide mutual entertainment and could often generate healthy discourse or occasionally heated debate with parents, brothers, sisters and maybe even grannies. Today TV is still an activity for the whole family, but in an entirely different way.

Until recently my cousin had three children living at home. And five TV sets. While her husband watched the cricket in the morning room and she was tucked up on the sofa in the lounge in front of Sex and the City, each of the kids was in their own room, watching their own TV. Often, by pure coincidence, it would happen that they were watching the same thing, but they never got together. Viewing was a solitary experience for them as it is becoming for more and more of the nation's telly addicts.

Minor-interest or targetted channels like Dave, and the potential equivalent ladies and gay channels of which my aforementioned colleague wrote, can only serve to exacerbate this fragmentation of viewing life.

It's not just output variety that is driving this separation of interests. The increasing diversity of channels through which television can be consumed is pushing in the same direction. Not many homes have five sets like my cousin, but with USB-connected freeview tuners readily available, media streamed over the Internet, and TV companies publishing their content through YouTube, multiple traditional TV sets are increasingly unnecessary. A desktop PC, a laptop PC, or even a mobile phone as shown above can all step into the breach, and all are likely to be found in rooms other than the one with the main TV set in, which again means isolated viewing.

Added to this the increasing popularity of social networking sites like Facebook, where even my old local has a group through which we can all vicariously participate in their ongoing calendar of events without ever setting foot in the pub, and the chilling prospect of Huxley's Brave New World coupled with Forster's The Machine Stops takes a step closer.

I'm not advocating a return to the "good old days" of ITV and BBC being the only channels, but the prospect of a future where we all sit alone in our little cells consuming our personally- targetted programmes doesn't hold much excitement for me either. How about you?

[This article originally appeared on TV Scoop]