Your Incredible Mutating Television

On Saturday, May 6 some 41 Mass Comm 101 students and guests went to Glendale's Alex Theatre for a matinee presented by the Alex Film Society. The festivities centered around a screening of the Beatles' film "A Hard Day's Night."

Just what is television in 2006? Is it something you watch on a screen in the living room? Is it something that plays in the background as you pump gas or wait in a doctors' office or travel on a crosstown bus? Or is it the video that you see on popular web sites such as YouTube.com?

According to a recent Calendar section article in the Los Angeles Times, it's all of that and more. Staff Writer Paul Brownfield says he watches homemade videos wherever and whenever he wants (for example, from his video iPod as he crosses Wilshire Boulevard). Other times, he is made to watch professionally-produced programming during those moments that he is a captive audience (as he waits in the supermarket checkout line, for example).

The result is a wildly experimental era in which video programming can and is about anything and everything or nothing at all. The resulting product can be both dreadful and fascinating.