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From family altar to pocket-sized gadget 

I don't follow fashion trends at all. While everyone else is driving a car, I travel by train. While everyone else is nattering on their mobile phone, I switch on my Combox. And when I was given a fancy new Nokia with TV reception as a present recently, I was sure that I'd never watch TV while I was on the move, because the real life I encounter is considerably more interesting than the poor imitation portrayed on the TV screen.

Well, that was until the evening of the 6th of July. The Wimbledon Men's Final. We had a reservation at our local Italian at eight, but the match between Federer and Nadal was so exciting that no-one could tear themselves away from the TV. So I switched my Nokia to mobile TV, and we headed out to the restaurant, where we sat in a semicircle, staring at the screen on my mobile (the picture was amazingly clear, by the way). But something wasn't quite right: the match that had had us all totally absorbed earlier, suddenly lost its fascination. As the drama heightened, the allure faded. The battle of the titans became just a trivial game. It wasn't as if we had suddenly become distracted by the Barolo, I mean, we drink it at home too, but usually it's secondary to what's going on on the TV screen. But now the balance had shifted, the wine glass had taken on a more immediate presence, the picture had become more surreal. Without Heinz Günthard's creaky voice, we were left wondering: Is this Wimbledon live - or are we watching a video clip? As a mobile TV, it's fabulously practical and technically astounding, but something so small that we can hold in our hands can never get the better of us.

And it doesn't have to. But it dawned on me how much the medium of television has changed. The television set used to be the family altar. We would sit in front of it like we would in front of the pulpit in church, amazed by the stories it told us from America, from Vietnam, from the Olympic Games in Vancouver, the May Day parade in Moscow. Television was the gateway to the world, the room would become blurred, displaced by the presence of strange and distant places. From the comfort of our own home, we could see for miles.

Now we take the TV everywhere with us, it's on our mobiles, on the Internet. We watch TV everywhere and all the time. And yet what will we learn from it? Not an awful lot. It's more on-demand TV, whenever you want it. The viewer gets to play at being the TV director, deciding what to watch and when to watch it. This is happening already. Talkshows, cooking shows, Desperate Housewives, soap operas… No sign of the wider world. No looking beyond the horizon. TV is becoming short-sighted. I'm not saying that these mobile, pocket-sized TVs are to blame, they have just brought it my attention.

So, folks. Mobile TV may be perfect. But it doesn't beat a good Barolo. And it definitely doesn't beat a good conversation.

Ludwig Hasler