Don't Blame Me, Blame Society
There's a part of GTA that my wife really hates. The player has a bunch of random phrases that he spouts off based on the context of the moment. For instance, when you pick up money off of a dead enemy, he'll say something like, "I'll take that paper" or "Thanks, I like to share, too".

The thing that pisses my wife off is one of the phrases he uses right after killing someone. The phrase is, "Don't blame me, blame society." Every time she hears it, she asks me to drive off a cliff, or somehow punish the character.

I think the thing that she hates about it is that people are willing to do bad things as long as they think they can blame it on "society". There's a lot of that thinking going around, and it's applicable to all kinds of situations. "I eat a lot because people judge me and call me fat", "I steal because the man won't give a brother a break." That kind of thinking is inherently irresponsible, and leads to irresponsible actions, which degrades society, which gives more people an excuse.

I gotta segue here to something else for a second. The networks are starting to shift their schedules around by a minute or so, adding a minute here or there. The idea behind it is, if you watch a show until 9:01, then you won't change the channel to watch another show that started at 9:00.

I've got a TiVo, and I haven't watched live TV in three years. This means that when they pad the time out, I end up getting a minute clipped off of my shows. Now TiVo may not be an international norm, but there are tens of thousands of people who have a TiVo. Or if not TiVo specifically, then some other kind of PVR; And there are still the people who use the timers on their VCRs. So I can't help but think that a lot of other people are dealing with the same problem I am.

Now, let's look at another data point. BBC Tech news points out that people are spending more time on the Internet, which is eating into TV viewing time.

So, putting these all together, this is what I see happening:

A user is watching his favorite TV show, which is cut off just when the detective says, "You're all wrong. The killer is right here in this room and . . ."

Anguished, the user turns off his TV, and goes over to his computer. He tries to find a synopsis for his show, asks on boards, "I missed the last minute, does anybody know what happened?"

Two posts later, a BitTorrent link pops up. The user clicks on it, maybe not even knowing what BitTorrent is, and about ten minutes later, he sees the whole episode sitting on his desktop.

He gets back on the board, "Thanks! Where did you find that?"

And so, the user finds out about suprnova and newsreaders. Looking through the index, the user sees that he can download an entire season of this show. He finds shows he remembers from his childhood (Wow! Every episode of "The Greatest American Hero"! The pilot episode of "Automan" and "Manimal"!) HDTV quality video! No commercials ever!

At this point, the user has gone from consumer to leech, and by some definitions, a pirate. But in his mind, it's okay, because the networks were the ones who did this to him. The networks put twenty minutes of commercials into every hour. The networks time-shifted their episodes so that his favorites got cut off.

As the networks add one hurdle after another to their shows, aren't they guaranteeing more piracy? Aren't they shooting themselves in the foot and inviting piracy by doing this?

Or, and here's the big question, are we just taking a page from GTA and saying, "Don't blame me. Blame society."
- posted by BrandG @ 2:20 AM