They’re all computer monitors now
Back around 1991, at the dawn of the interactive media “revolution”, I made a silly vow that the largest video display in my home would always be a computer monitor. The line of reasoning was “everthing worthwhile would emit from a computer screen rather than a television screen”.
Now, 18 years later, the vow seems silly, but I actually kept it, and my thinking proved essentially correct. Because today, the largest and best screen in many of our homes is a flat-panel screen with a multitude of connectors for various video, computing and gaming (e.g. specialized computing) devices. Yeah, we can call it an LCD or plasma TV if we want, but we know it’s much more that that.
So I found it rather odd that this recent New York Times piece on why we no longer need TVs came so close to reaching a similar conclusion, yet unnecessarily backed off at the end.