You there, Hot Potato ;)

The audience can be anyone; age, race, gender, class... even species. They could be watching television, a movie, the opera, or be on the internet.

However, in recent times, the notion of the audience has changed quite a bit. Now it is possible for an audience to interact with media. All I imagine when I say this word ‘interact’ is a world like the movie Minority Report where we can fiddle around with technology with our hands moving around in the air wearing these special glove things. In some respects, this is the way that audiences are connecting to what they see (without the gloves of course). People have the freedom to view what they want, when they want. Adverts are no longer becoming an issue when watching television – we can always record and watch our programme at a later time while fast forwarding through the adverts. I like that I can now go online and watch the episodes I couldn’t watch because for some reason Starplus was a lot more important to watch that day than just normal mainstream television. I don’t just have to leave it at watching that episode, I can even comment on it and make suggestions about what should be written into the script in the future (if I really was that eager to do so).

Has this all effectively changed the belief of the Couch Potato?

My understanding of the mythological creature the Couch Potato was that it lurks in our homes at any given time of the day. It eats, sleeps, and occasionally prowls around the house environment, either to hunt or visit the bathroom… Yes, the Couch Potato is still very much alive, but in a more evolved form you might say. Everyone knows that the television (and I’m specifically referring to the television here) makes us all complacent potatoes who are inadvertently being stuffed with advertisements and underlying discourses about who we are and what we should consume. We are passive audiences sitting there and baking in a television screening oven. But now we have a choice we did not have before. Now we can actively go out there and look for what it is we want to watch, just as we select what it is we want to read in the news, and take it in actively. Actively pushing our brains to do something, to think something, to have something to say about what is being viewed.