The demise of Television

Remember when "the idiot box" robbed families of true togetherness? Technology is relentless, and now the cell phone has robbed us of our family-time in front of the T.V. Something is always vibrating, chiming or playing musical ring tones, which is usually followed by many buttons being pressed, because no one actually talks anymore, they text.

The language of the text is very abbreviated, which has some parents baffled. Think about it though, us old fogies invented the acronym and have used them for years. We had a.s.a.p.(asap), byob, sob, bs, a-hole (which is half acronym and probably represents the birth of the acronym. Interesting that leaving out a couple s' somehow made this more appropriate to say.) r&r, b&b, r&b, b&o, b.o., fu (which also represents another progression in acronyms, where a letter replaces a whole word phonetically, which is also a mainstay of texting.) Texting uses the same concepts we developed,there are just a slew of new acronyms to learn if you so desire.


The sting of modern technology robbing my family of our tv time is no longer an issue because my kids are no longer at home. My days of people calling, texting, and IM'ing my house at 2 AM are over. Most of the time I was kept in the dark about it, but when I somehow became aware of it, I never understood completely giving up your personal time this way, and being accessible 24 hours a day. At this point I will briefly touch on the flaw with the statement 24/7/365. The progression is from 24 hours in a day to 7 days in a week to 52 weeks in a year: 24/7/52. Why refer to days twice, with 7 and 365?, just a question.

Back to acronyms. The ones that trouble me are the secretive ones like PLOS(or something like that), which means parents looking over shoulder (or something like that). To me the progression from plos to blos(boss), or slos(spouse), or ainthsflos (anyone I need to hide stuff from) is BS. This secretive behavior almost always leads to hurt feelings or someones death.

They do have some good acronyms these days. There is KMA (kiss my a--), LMAO (laughing my a-- off), TMWYLSICSY (tell me where you live so I can stalk you ) If you fall for that one I guess you get what you deserve.

They actually have shows on MTV where you can watch young people sit around and text each other, oddly enough they call it the real world or something like that. If you don't have kids, or yours are off to college or something, you can tune in for a little reminder of what it's like. They throw in a little BFLOS (boy friend looking over shoulder) so there is also some life-like controversy involved as they innocently text some new "friend."

I guess I just miss the days of guessing commercials as a family. I miss sitting around in our bow ties and laughing in unison at the antics of the stooges as Mom brought us more Ovaltine. I miss the good old days, before cell phones and texting robbed us of our tv time.