Avoiding the Wormhole

Escaping detection by overlord aliens

As you all know, we, as a family, are all about our devices. Mommy, daddy, sister,  brother, all gobbling up bandwidth. Many friends and relatives have tut-tutted about how we probably text each other when the salt needs to be passed.

I can’t really say there is a method to our madness, but there can be advantages.

Disney’s “Brave” will be released in eight days. Because we only watch programming we stream through our Xbox (Netflix, HuluPlus), the kids avoid being pummeled into quivering mouse goo by the Disney marketing machine which would by now have us brainwashed and dressed in the characters’ garb camping out to see the film’s first showing.

Disney’s cultural products are often first-rate, but it’s the marketing wormholes – from “Lion King” toothpaste to “Little Mermaid” dinnerware -- that get me thinking we live in a soulless dystopia run by rapacious overlord aliens.

By removing cable TV from the mix, our media diet becomes much more fragmented and the kids then miss the high-rotation ads they would be exposed to if they frequently watched a show on cable.

At the moment a website for kids called “Club Penguin” is the drug of choice. Such websites have their own addictive risks and (money) traps, but usually avoid the overt direct advertising of traditional broadcast media. Generally I am more favorably inclined to interactive sites than to the programming on the big three: Nickelodeon, Disney, Cartoon Network.

Much like our food diet, I am inconsistent and convoluted in my thinking about our media diet  – how much time on an interactive website equals one show watched on our television? My daughter has already told me she believes she was kidnapped at an early age and is being raised by weird overlord aliens. Ah, the circle of life™!