DATELINE–The South Pole

ON THE FIRST DAY OF WEB-TV MY TRUE LOVE SONY GAVE TO ME: at last an affordable e-mail and http browser without a keyboard, see?

ON THE SECOND DAY OF WEB-TV MY TRUE LOVE SONY GAVE TO ME: the option to buy a keyboard at almost 100% the price of the initial “receiver” unit doubling the total cost to almost one thousand dollars, U.S. currency.

ON THE THIRD DAY OF WEB-TV MY TRUE LOVE SONY GAVE TO ME: television advertisements spoofing the remotely controlling finger exercises the Web-TV Internet Commander™ will inspire in couch potato-fied Americans like you and me.

ON THE FOURTH DAY OF WEB-TV MY TRUE LOVE SONY GAVE TO ME: the ability to “receive” information “broadcast” over the Internet by “transmitters” like Sony, Pathfinder, Microsoft, Yahoo and ZD – making the Internet a whole lot like standard TV!

ON THE FIFTH DAY OF WEB-TV MY TRUE LOVE SONY GAVE TO ME: the expensive “option” of typing in information and messages of my own making, and “sharing” these ideas and feelings with those other people – like you and me – who use the Internet to communicate instead as a one-way conduit for watching even more commercials or choosing between even more commercial-driven “entertainment,” yippee!

ON THE SIXTH DAY OF WEB-TV MY TRUE LOVE SONY GAVE TO ME: a condescending insult in the form of a little black box that presumes with so much circuitry and silicon that Americans are too lazy or too stupid to produce the so-called “content” available on the Web today but, rather, are only willing to sit down during their rapidly diminishing leisure time hours in front of another big monitor and receive spoon-fed reports of their favorites stars’ opinions, their favorite teams’ statistics, their favorite anxieties’ scapegoats – yes, that’s Web-TV!

ON THE SEVENTH DAY OF WEB-TV MY TRUE LOVE SONY GAVE TO ME: a Web that’s even more like TV and another incentive for the Big Boys to truncate news stories, screen opinions, censor trends, turn down alternative news reports, accept more advertisements, place more scrolling titles on the screen, hire more palatable mulatto™ and mulatta™ spokesmodels to deliver the “news,” concentrate on such meaningless variables as the weather and the stock market, give more free advertising time to featured products and/or whole companies under the sheep’s clothing of “review,” and build bigger! better! search engines to churn the above-mentioned regurgitated info-vomit in a stupefyingly pointless exercise of POINT & CLICK idiocy!

ON THE EIGHTH DAY OF WEB-TV MY TRUE LOVE SONY GAVE TO ME: the sobering realization that most “professional” journalists will sell out the vocation of writer for the bright and shiny title of producer (even Executive Producer, oh my!), and don’t care to recognize the deepening divide between those for whom the cell-phone bell tolls and those for whom communication and higher education is becoming too expensive a “commodity.”

ON THE NINTH DAY OF WEB-TV MY TRUE LOVE SONY GAVE TO ME: a simple equation with which to understand how modern-day poverty and wealth is written into technology to afford some entertainment and others opportunity.

ON THE TENTH DAY OF WEB-TV MY TRUE LOVE SONY GAVE TO ME: a play station, a personal computer, and, thirdly, Web-TV – why, we wonder, not one with all three?

ON THE ELEVENTH DAY OF WEB-TV MY TRUE LOVE SONY GAVE TO ME: another domestic appliance to keep me happily isolated inside my carefully-monitored cell-block domesticity.

ON THE TWELFTH DAY OF WEB-TV MY TRUE LOVE SONY GAVE TO ME: a read-only VCR for the 90’s.