A million channels, and nothing’s going on

Is new media just providing us with ever more hi-tech ways to be bored?

I remember when Diamond Cable fist arrived on my street. Back when the newest thing in media was Channel 5, the man who came to install the primitive black boxes with the orange-buttoned remote appeared as something of a modern messiah to the grateful cul-de-sac. Fast forward a few years and Sky was the new kid on the block, hotly followed by its sexier and more flexible sister, Sky+. But the proliferation of channels, from 5 to 500+, never quite managed to rid us of the age-old problem: ‘There’s nothing on TV.’

The channels of communication we all plug into today defy counting. Half of us in the UK have a Facebook page, three or more email accounts are increasingly standard, we have our personalised YouTube, our Twitter, not to mention the slightly more esoteric social networks like Bebo, FourSquare, MySpace... The list rolls on. Better yet, our smartphones act as portable communications hubs, giving us instant access to all of these platforms. And if we get bored of connecting with our hundreds of ‘friends,’ we can log into Chat Roulette and converse (etc.) with total strangers.

So why has Sunday night boredom survived this cataclysmic media explosion??

It seems that while the world of communications technology has mutated exponentially, we human beings (or maybe it’s just me?) still haven’t evolved immunity to the deadly bores. A few seconds with my beloved HTC is now all it takes to verify that no, I haven’t got any new notifications. And no, no direct messages on Twitter since yesterday. No texts and nobody on Facebook chat to whom I would actually ever chat in real life.

Thank Zuckerberg for the new culture that allows us to air our grievances to 800 of our closest friends. Because everybody cares what’s going through our minds at any one moment. (And even if they don’t, Facebook allows us to pretend they do.)The social universe responded to my 'bored' status through one friend's ever so slightly sarcastic answer: ‘Blog about it.’

And so I did.