In Pat Cadigan's anthology of short works "Patterns", she included this introduction to her short story[1] with the same name: > Television will achieve its ap

In Pat Cadigan's anthology of short works "Patterns", she included this introduction to her short story[1] with the same name: > Television will achieve its apotheosis when it is interactive. > Of course, some people think they have that now. For some people, TV reality is as much of a reality as what they move through most of the day. I remember listening to two people I used to work with discussing the horrible burden a character on a TV series would have to bear for causing someone's death in a fire. These were not uneducated or isolated people; they had simply been drawn in so far, they were projecting the characters well beyond the end of the show -- indeed, beyond the life of the series itself. And we've all heard amusing stories about actors who play soap opera villains suddenly attacked by irate viewers who cannot separate actor and character, Maybe more people can't than can -- the host of Death Valley Days was President of the United States for eight years. > Does TV encourage, or even induce, schizophrenia? Or does it create a separate reality in conjunction with our minds, something that is neither totally our inner life nor totally TV. The networks might call that programming. Marshall McLuhan explained how humans see tools - such as media - as an "extension of ourselves". It's important to keep this in mind when creating tools or types of media: you're also defining part of the human that uses the tool. [1] The short story "Patterns" was originally published in the August 1987 issue of Omni.