Digital Bushcraft

It’s got to the point now where I can predict, with quite some accuracy, plot developments, which adverts signify a return to ‘normal’ programming and lines of script from any given TV show(s). I attribute this freakish and frankly useless power to being raised by television. When I was younger the Internet wasn’t the shiny, interactive, social cohesion platform it is today. It was more like web 0.5 than web 2.0.

The biggest technical advancement in my home was the advent of cable television provided by the now long debunked Cable London (who’s logo incidentally was a kind of Pac man made out of dots). Anyway, I remember the first day well. No longer would I have to succumb to the schedules of the tyrannical, terrestrial channels. I could watch cartoons well beyond the 4.30 – 5 cut off point.


Stranger still, my dad tells me that I passed a test on Shakespeare with flying colours despite never having read any of his plays all thanks to the brain melting box. I suppose it follows that if I was retaining information from TV, on another level I was learning the conventions of television itself.

As the years progressed it became easier and easier to identify what kind of episode any given series would be trying out within the first few seconds. Would it be the evil twin, the protagonist being framed, death of a significant character, plot twist or redemption episodes? Hmm. I couldn’t tell you how I knew, I just did.

I could also accurately predict that when a Sky advert was shown the actual program would either start immediately after or depending on the length of said Sky advert there would be one very short ad immediately after. Ooooeeeeooooo.


So far we’ve talked about this ability as it relates to the confines of TV land, you can just imagine how much I’ve gone on to freak myself and those around me out since the advent of the interweb as we knew it a few years ago to the present day.

I find myself drawing connections to completely unrelated things from starkly different media. Apart from impressing geeks and scaring my significant other, whether this digital bushcraft; bringing wholly unrelated bits and combining them into something new, will every prove useful is still debateable.