The New Couch Potato
By Ron Steinman

South Korea is a world leader in Internet connectivity and citizen participation on the Web. For all that increasingly important industrial nation’s role in modernizing its information paradigm, there has been a cost. A new addict is now on the scene, one who seems straight out of science fiction. Call him or her The Internet Addict, a person, usually young, often a teenager who glues him or herself to the computer screen and never leaves, not even for food or sex. All activity, physical or spiritual, suffers. What matters is only what happens on the screen in front of that person. Without knowing precisely, it seems to me that the arms, legs and bodies of these addicts shrink and their hands and heads grow grotesquely out of proportion to the rest of their body. To counter this phenomenon it did not take long for South Korea, as a leader in the new world of the computer couch potato, to come up with yet another innovation in the world of 2.0, or, better, 3.0. South Korea looked for a solution to this growing syndrome and came up with sleep-away boot camps where the Internet Addict who spends countless hours online to the decline and detriment of all other activity, can go to break their debilitating habit.

Couch potato is the popular term used to describe anyone who settles into the proverbial couch, or an armchair, even on the floor, the remote control – also known as the clicker -- in hand, popcorn or nachos, usually a box of chocolates at his or her side and with a diet Coke, Pepsi or beer to sip or guzzle while watching endless television. The assumption is that because watching TV is passive – the only activity is changing a channel with the flip of a thumb -- the mind atrophies, the body slackens, and all cares, good and bad flit away into the ether never to raise again their ugly or, if lucky, even pretty heads.

There, however, is clearly, at least for me, a new couch potato in our midst vying for the undisputed title, King or Queen of Passivity. He or she is none other than the legion of those people who spend endless hours at the computer, stuck to the screen, moving a mouse or forefinger on a touch pad instead of a remote control, and developing calluses on their behinds because they have been sitting for too many hours without moving. I do not believe that the computer with its access to the World Wide Web is anything less than another passive activity. Wipe out the idea of participatory activity. It does not exist despite the idea that anyone investing time on his or her computer is really far more active than those who spend time hidden behind a remote control. I’ll admit to that, but after a while continued mechanical repetition without any thought or care, is nothing more than inaction, passivity brought to a new height.
I can already hear the defiant shouting: computers foster ultra brain activity; computers allow for creativity where none previously existed; computers allow people to discover other people with similar thoughts and ideas – Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, and a host of other social networking sites new and old; computers give people the freedom to express their most intimate desires; computers free people from the tyranny of TV with its simplicity and sameness. Nonsense.

Constant and steady activity on the computer for many, especially the young, is akin to a lock-down in a leaking nuclear reactor. No one can move out of the bubble for fear of disrupting an already precarious situation. The brain fogs. Fingers move as if separate from the rest of the body. The heart freezes, not from the lack of emotion, but from the potential loss of feeling. Soul, wherever it is, flees from its hidden seat. There is a loss of connection from the real world as the person waits for a solution to what is potentially a psychic disaster. This happens when the new couch potato engages the computer as the hopeless fanatic he or she is. Am I dealing in hyperbole? Absolutely. Yet there is truth in everything I say.

We now live in a world of what advertising agencies call video capable devices. Everything on the computer is suddenly a window, meaning the PC with the advent of useable broadband is the new TV set for many viewers. That is far from active participation unless you call turning on the computer a hardcore act.

So far there is no evidence that hands-on, hard-core activity, meaning those boot camps, which remove the Internet Addict from a computer screen will wean a person from his or her addiction. Substituting one couch for another only makes for mashed potatoes, tasty, if made right, but with no clear definition. Creating new avenues for viewing only sets up more pathways for watching the increasingly smaller screen and only increases the chances for passivity. I see addicts multiplying in droves beyond all expectations. The once ubiquitous clicker is not yet obsolete. It exists in a new form that makes me think there must be a gene for couch potato deeply hidden in our DNA.
Yet, there is hope. Of all the new devices in recent years that link a person with TV, broadband, and many ubiquitous games, there is the very popular Wii by Nintendo. Hope giving because it engages the user, both physically and mentally. Even today with the new couch potato heading quickly to the front, using Wii forces the person off the couch with its remote control, which allows “users to wave the device to manipulate action on the screen.” With Wii, there is life, and where there is life, there is hope that not everyone who spends his or her days at the computer or a hand-held device will at least use more energy than that generated by a couple or gifted thumbs.
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At NBC News for 35 years, Ron Steinman was bureau chief in Saigon, Hong Kong and London, was a senior producer on Today and wrote and produced for Sunday Today. At ABC News Productions, he produced and wrote documentaries for A&E, TLC, Discovery, Lifetime and the History Channel. He has a Peabody, a National Headliner award, a National Press Club award, a International Documentary Festival Gold Camera Award, two American Women in Radio & Television awards and has been nominated for five Emmy's. He is a partner in Douglas/Steinman Productions, whose latest documentary, "Luboml: My Heart Remembers," aired on PBS' WLIW/21 and the History Channel in Israel, April 29, 2003. He is the author of, "The Soldiers 'Story", "Women in Vietnam," and most recently, "Inside Television's First War: A Saigon  Journal," University of Missouri Press, 2002.

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