Time for an upgrade

This prompted by BH observing this morning that she found it rather irritating to have people signing on the left hand part of her television screen when she was trying to watch what passes for news. Seemingly people who were much better at signing that at looking good on telly - and anyway, they distracted from the headline act.

So let us fast forward to a world where we all watch television on what are or what amount to computer screens. To a world when we all have access to a fat enough pipe onto the Internet.

Then the feed which brings us our news can be digital and organised into streams. We can turn streams on and off. We can decide where to put a stream on our screen and how loud we want it to be, just as we can decide about windows on our computer screen. BH could certainly turn off the stream containing the signer.

Another angle might be that I would have thought that one could turn the words of Boris, or even the rather Scots flavoured words of Nicola, into the written word at about the same speed that a signer could turn them into sign. One might enlist the help of one of those big computers from the people at Google. So instead of having a signer taking up the left hand side of the screen, I could have words scrolling along the bottom of the screen. With choice of font and language, naturally. And in my brave new digital world I could chose which one of these options I preferred.

Clearly, in my own case, when my ears conk out, quite likely at some point in the next twenty years or so, I am not going to want or to be able to learn sign, so when I forget to put my hearing aids in, my choice is going to be words along the bottom.

But perhaps I am a bit out of touch. Maybe they are doing all this sort of thing already. Maybe if I actually watched the news on television from time to time I would find out.

PS: Boris might not be too happy about my having so much control over how he appeared on my screen. It's already bad enough that I can turn him on or off, but the idea that I might manipulate his carefully crafted performance is too much. And thinking with my fingers, I might get a clever bit of software from one of those hacker palaces in Moscow which distorts the Boris body image. So instead of a moderately fat Boris, I get a very fat one. Or a regular spitting image job. Or whatever. At which Boris rushes out and spends huge amounts of our money on expensive security types who try to fix up his broadcasts so that they can't be tampered with. At which we just turn them off.