Volume 50 Issue 8 - August 2012 : Entertainment

If you have gone a day without the remote controller, otherwise known conventionally as “remote control”, for your television set, your decoder or even for your gate, then there is a good chance you have not learnt to appreciate just how useful and indispensable the little gadget is. How else would you explain your hysterical search for your remote control when it goes missing when you could simply walk over to your decoder and switch channels?

Yes, the remote controller has come a long way, and found its way into our living rooms. From the look of things, the gadget is here to stay. For nearly 60 years, since it was first invented, people have developed strangely unhealthy relationships with it - a relationship that has turned them into ‘couch potatoes’. Freelance editor, Idoh Dintwe, is so heavily dependent on her remote controllers that she does not even care to learn how to operate her appliances manually.

“Whenever I misplace them or my kids are not home, I’m left clueless as to how to get anything to work,” Dintwe confesses. Whenever she is home, her decoder remote controller which is the most ‘important’ of the six she owns, is by her side especially to mark her territory as the mom, and for her to guide programme selection for her children. She explains that remote controllers tend to have a lot more features than the manual application.

So helpless is Dintwe without her gadgets or the guidance of her kids (today’s children are such technical whizzes!) that just recently she had to endure a whole episode of Generations without any sound, and like a hearing impaired person, had to rely only on sub-titles, because she did not know how to operate her niece’s home theatre system! On a scale of 1 - 10, Dintwe places herself at eight, that is as acutely addicted to the remote controller. She admits that remote controllers have turned some people into couch potatoes, and that the world is in danger of the laziness bug due to the gadget. “That is why I would rather search for the remote controller all over the house than get up and change the tv manually,” she says.

Thirty-year old Ndiyane Masole could not agree more: “Is there anyone who still changes their tv channels manually? I can’t go to all that trouble.” Masole, a seemingly semi couch potato owns four remote controllers for various appliances in her house. For her “life would literally stop” without the convenience of a remote controller. “I wonder what people used to do without ‘remotes’. My experience without them would be traumatic; having to walk across the room to reduce the volume!” Needless to say she has no interest, whatsoever, in using anything that has a remote controller manually unless she has misplaced it. In which case, she admits to turning the whole house upside down just to locate the ‘remote’.

The concept of a universal remote controller is one she warmly accepts and feels it is a great invention. Sure enough she pegs herself at nine out of 10 on the ‘remote’ obsession scale - almost desperately obsessed. Second year science and economics student, Omphile Simon, is a proud owner of five remote controllers. For her also no remote controller means no television. “It is tiring; think about getting off the chair to the tv which is probably about five meters away,” he says. For him it saves him the time and the energy. Rating himself a 10 out of 10, he is hopelessly obsessed with the gadget, and it is easy to see why: “Isn’t that the whole reason they made remote controllers? For us to use them?”

His Dstv remote controller is the most popular for flipping through channels. But he is very defensive when you associate remote controllers with laziness. “NO! It’s there to be used, it is not like you choose it should be there, it’s part of these appliances. They are meant to help us out,” he opines. As far as manual operation goes, reading the manual is traumatic enough. “Plus there are a lot more options on remote controllers!” Take all remote controllers from gadget-crazy Simon for 24 hours and you may as well have locked him up in a dark room. “I can’t even get through 20 minutes without them. It’s a reflex thing.”

As it turns out the inventor of the tv remote contorller, Eugene Polley, died in May 2012 at the age of 96. And many will agree that this man left a legacy for his generation and its progeny. Seemingly, no one has been able to create anything better than the remote controller. CNN reporter, Dan Frommer writes: “While the picture quality on your tv has evolved over the years, the way you interact with your tv is still stuck in the Stone Age.  That is, the remote controller and channel guide still need some serious innovation.” Not without its fair share of controversy, the remote controller has been used by some in unconventional ways.

There have been an increasing number of remote controlled explosive incidents where scores of people have lost their lives, especially in the Middle East, according to various international news sources. CNN network also reported in 2010 that smart phones may replace remote controllers. Well, not in this part of the world it appears. Here the remote controller is still king. As Masole puts it; “If anything can be done with a remote I’ll go for it.”  ENDS

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