Monday – Space, Time, and DVR Mechanics

READING SUMMARY

This reading by Klosterman analyzes the question of why watching a prerecorded sport event is not as pleasurable as watching the same game live. If the game is finished, it will automatically be less interesting, and you’ll just fast-forward to see how it ends. There are two categories of reasoning for this: the rational and irrational explanations. The rational explanation consists of three reasons. First, the skipping/lack of commercials in a recorded sporting event takes away drama and tension. Second, you are distant from the event, as you do not share time or space with it, and therefore it creates little emotive response from you. Third, recording gives you too much control; is it worth your time at all? The irrational explanation includes two reasons. The first is very illogical; “perhaps my personal involvement with this game will impact the outcome.” The second shows how interconnected we all are, especially with social media today; “if this game has already ended and I don’t know anything about what happened, it was probably just a game.” Overall, a prerecorded event will never feel the same as a live one, as anything can happen when something is live.

OUTSIDE EXAMPLE

My dad is the only one in my family who actually watches games and sports. The rest of us in the family just watch our own television shows, and it doesn’t really matter when those were live. The one reason we have Hulu is because it has live sports: the only way my dad will watch the games. He would rather pay the high cost of Hulu each month than watch recorded games, or simply not watch them at all. Whenever we’re out somewhere during a game, he does not watch the game later, but instead checks his phone constantly for the score while we are at the store, in the car, etc.

READING CONNECTION

Like many people, as proven in this reading, my dad will only watch sports live because they are not the same as prerecorded sports games. Although he does not believe in the irrational explanation that his involvement in the game will impact the outcome, he would rather look up the ending score online than watch the game after it is over. It makes sense; why would you wait to figure out the ending when the whole world already knows it? I am not the biggest fan of sports, but I too would much rather go to an actual sports game or watch it live. Even with things like the presidential election, everyone either watches the news all night live to see who wins what states or looks up the results in the morning (my family typically does the later). Whether it is sports or another live event, people prefer to watch these things live or simply not at all and hear about them later.