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I’m not one of those Luddite purists that screams that Television is Evil and rots your brain. When it’s good, it can be very good, indeed. (The West Wing, anyone?) And even half-way decent television can be entertaining, with a good story, and be a fun distraction for an hour. Since this is Summer, though (according to the television schedule, at least), most of the programming right now is either repeats–if you’re lucky–of shows you like, or a lot of dreck which I wouldn’t willingly give an hour of my valuable time. So, lately, we’ve been watching a lot of DVDs.

One thing that I’ve just realized, though, is how similar some of my very favorite shows are. They have an earnest, smart, good-hearted hero who devotes his time to helping people in need, usually with some, extra, supersensory gift. Sound familiar?

The shows I’m talking about?

Quantum Leap–a brilliant scientist attempts time travel and ends up being leaped into lives in crisis, and doesn’t leave until he’s changed them for the better.

Early Edition–A nice, average joe of a man starts getting tomorrow’s newspaper today, and runs around Chicago trying to forestall catastrophes, and knows he’s managed when the bad headline is replaced by something innocuous about town meetings or sporting events. (I loved the scene where he tried to call a Russian nuclear plant to warn them of an imminent meltdown without being able to speak anything but English.)

Chuck–My current favorite show, with a smart, underachieving geek who gets a computer full of government secrets uploaded into his brain and now must help the government keep the country safe while also trying to protect his family and friends and live as normal a life as possible.

Eli Stone–One of those “gone too soon” shows, this starred a San Francisco lawyer who develops a brain aneurism and starts seeing visions which may or may not make him a prophet–but when he follows the clues in the visions and takes the right cases, helps out people in need.

Lois and Clark–Yes, I know, it’s not as trendy as Smallville was a couple years ago, but I loved this 1990s version of Superman which, again, had a well-meaning hero with special gifts that he used to help people out.

Beauty and the Beast–Going back even further, to the Ron Perlman/Linda Hamilton show with, again, a hero with special gifts (and a knack for riding on the top of subway trains) who helps out his own personal damsel in distress.

Due South–True, Benton Fraser didn’t have any special abilities beyond his keen observations and pure heart, but he was as earnest and well-meaning a hero as a girl could want.

And those are just the tv shows I have on DVD. (Yes, I do own copies of all of them, and yes, some of them are better than others.) That’s not even counting other shows I’ve watched over the years. A lot of those heroes have similar traits, too. Jarod from The Pretender, for example. How about Max Evans, the gifted (and earnest and good-hearted) alien from Roswell? Anyone remember Benu from the really old, short-lived series The Phoenix? Patrick Jane of the Mentalist fits this mold, too. For that matter, so does Buffy Summers (except for the fact that she’s obviously not a man.)

Obviously, I’ve got some kind of archetype of HERO in my head that calls very strongly to me–especially when sitting down for some entertainment in front of the television. Or with a good book, for that matter, because I can think of any number of heros in my library who would fit right in with this group of men on my television screen.

What is it that makes this template of a hero call to me so strongly?

The fact that these characters are so determined to help and not be corrupted by the gifts they have (even if occasionally tempted)? They’re all handsome, and that doesn’t hurt. There’s something very appealing to me in the fact that they (mostly) all have special gifts–I like the extra touch of magic/certainty that their special abilities give them. It takes away so much pesky questioning–”Is this really a person I should help?” King Arthur and Benton Fraser would get along just fine. Luke Skywalker and Chuck Bartowski could certainly get together over a drink and commiserate (though maybe not about their father-issues).

The word “hero” brings different pictures into different minds, of course, and there are always varying definitions of heroism. Certainly there are a wide variety of heros I admire and appreciate in my reading and viewing pleasure. But obviously the earnest, well-meaning, smart, and gifted hero touches a special kind of chord.

What kind of heros do you find yourself drawn to? And does it affect the way you write them? Affect the types of books, shows, and movies you enjoy?

Today, in the U.S., all televisions are officially switching from analog to digital transmission, forever turning the page on the tradition of television signals broadcast, for free, through the air.* In many ways, this is a seamless change–most people will never even notice–but the very IDEA is one that I find intriguing.

How many ways has the digital revolution touched and changed my life? Your life?

• Telephones: We went from party lines with a real, live operator connecting our calls, to rotary dials, to push button phones. Then we went cordless. Then there were car phones and really heavy, bulky briefcase phones, which were quickly supplanted by cell phones which have gotten smaller and sleeker.

• Answering Machines: I remember so clearly when I was the only kid I knew whose house had an answering machine, and that was solely because my father’s business was down in our The machine recorded on magnetic tape and it only recorded messages of a certain length. If you were too wordy, too bad; you got cut off. Then there were machines that recorded the messages digitally, so that you could call home and dial in a specific code to pick up your messages. Now, most people have call waiting and voicemail and don’t even need a separate machine anymore (though, we still have ours).

• Music: Golly, remember when transistor radios were cool? How about vinyl 45 singles? 8-track tape players? The ever-popular boombox? Sony Walkman? And, CDs, of course, which were going to revolutionize music forever. And, well, they did for a while, but then along came MP3s… People used to be limited to listening to (1) live musical performances, (2) personally-selected music on the stereo in the privacy of their own home, or (3) whatever the DJ chose to play over the radio (AM or FM). If you were lucky, on long family vacations, you’d be able to find a decent radio station so that everyone in the car was satisfied with the choices.

• Calculators: Once, there were piles of stones to use in aid of mathematical achievements, then there was the abacus. Slates with chalk. Pencils with erasers. Automatic pencils that never needed sharpening. And then calculators. I still remember when my father brought our first one home in the early 1970s with firm admonitions to my sister and me to not touch because it was so expensive. By the time I was in high school, they were being given away as freebies by every bank, car wash, or business-type-of-your-choice.

• Computers: Talk about BIG calculators. At the beginning, that was really all these machines did–massive, complicated mathematical calculations. Then they started doing other things. My father got into computers early, in the 1950s, and worked as a programmer at one of the first banks to use one and still tells those “walked barefoot in the snow to school” kinds of stories about the vast size of the computer he worked on compared to the (relatively) tiny amounts of data it recorded. My first computer didn’t have a hard drive or a color monitor, and it used those old 5.25″ floppy disks, but I was still the first of my friends to have my own computer. Next came hard drives, and color, and laser printing, and smaller, faster machines with computing power that still makes my Dad giddy from time to time.

• The Internet: While having your very own computer for word processing and video games was cool, computers really got fascinating when the internet came along. Email. Chat rooms. Message boards. Wikipedia. Websites on every topic under the sun. Blogs by the thousands. Talk about an amazing resource–you can research, ask questions, confer with friends, make travel plans to meet them, and do just about anything all at the touch of a keyboard.

• Television: When my parents were children, houses had radios for entertainment. Then, there was one television–big as a piece of furniture, but with a tiny screen (possibly round). With, let’s not forget, rabbit ear antennas on the top, and a dial to turn for channel selection, plus a knob for volume. Then along came color. Next, it was cable television so you didn’t need the antennas anymore, then satellite. Now, we not only have cable and satellite for clear, sharp pictures, but we also have high-definition signals for even clearer, sharper pictures. Not to mention the internet, where we can watch shows at our convenience, rather than according to when the networks want us to watch.

• Television Recording: Do you remember the VCR revolution? Not only did you suddenly have a movie theater in your living room, but you could record a television program so that you wouldn’t miss it if you were out, or watching something else? Sure, philistines complained that the point of being away from the television was to miss watching things, but I remember this as being akin to magic. We could watch one thing and record something else. We could go on vacation and still not miss the season finales of our favorite shows. (Well, six of them, since the video tapes could only hold up to 6 hours of recording … and at $20 each, you didn’t have too many of them.) This lasted for years, and then there were cable boxes which limited the channel you could record to the one you were watching (bummer). Then there was Tivo and the other digital recording devices so that you could record and save shows without needing the tapes, and … with a DVD-recorder, you could burn them to DVD, too.

And now?

What’s the point of this trip down memory lane?

The absolutely amazing thing is that you can pretty much do all of these things at the same time, on the same piece of equipment.

You can watch television on your computer. You can check your email from your telephone. You can make video calls over your computer. You can calculate your tip at a restaurant on your watch. If you even wear a watch, because many people don’t because they can check the time an assortment of electronic devices within finger’s reach. All of these electronic gadgets are one bare step away from being interchangeable, allowing for a certain level of portability–and weight.

Just in my lifetime, I am astounded at how much has changed–and the digital electronics revolution has been a huge part of that. There was no such thing as cable television, personal computers, answering machines, calculators, or VCRs when I was born. So MANY things that I can’t imagine my life without simply didn’t exist. And the fact that they are all (except, apparently, electronic book readers) working together, blurring the boundaries just makes me feel excited to live in such a wonderful time.

But don’t forget–People Are Not Digital

With all this cool, new-technology hoopla, it’s sometimes easy to forget how far we’ve come, so quickly. Or to get so wound up with the freedom to be able to listen to whatever we want, whenever we want; to watch whatever we want; to call anyone from anywhere that we forget that the sense of freedom.

It’s easy to forget that it didn’t always work this way.

It’s easy to forget that we didn’t use to have so many choices.

It’s easy to forget that, while we arrange our digital lives to fit our personal needs, our NON-digital lives are still intertwined.

We need to remember that, while so many things transition to cool, fast, customizable digital technology, that we as people are, in fact, analog, and we need to work together, like the old vacuum tubes in the first computers–where, if they didn’t work together, they didn’t work at all.

So, remember this as you walk around your day, listening to music of your choice, talking to friends and business associates from the grocery store via the gadget in your pocket, checking your email while you wait on line, watching last night’s episode of Burn Notice while you ride the train.

All these choices and options at your fingertips–wondrous and convenient as they are–doesn’t make you the center of the universe, just the center of your own.

*Yes, I know that some stations are now broadcasting digital HDTV signals that you can capture with an antenna, but it’s still digital, and the people watching that way are very much in the minority, so … ignore that.

Last time, we talked about the ways you could preserve your anonymity by keeping your precious novel untouched and unpublished, but what if you don’t write novels? What if you write other things, like articles, press releases, and other types of non-fiction? How can you make sure that they stay unpublished?

Silence is Golden

This one’s simple–If you don’t tell anybody that you write, nobody’s going to ask you to write for them. If you don’t want to be pestered by paying clients and publishers, eager to have your words gracing their promotional materials, simply don’t tell them you could–you know, like a doctor keeping his profession to himself at a cocktail party if he doesn’t want to be asked for free advice.

Declare Yourself

(But do it very, very quietly)

Maybe you have announced that you’re a writer. You like the sound of it, you enjoy the idea of it, you like bragging about it, but you just don’t want to have to do any, well, work. So, this is ideal. By avoiding doing any promotion or any advertising, by not sending out queries, samples, resumes, and business cards, you can enjoy the idea of writing without ever having to prove that you can.

(While you’re at it, feel free to call yourself a designer, too. Or a photographer. Musician. Magician. Whatever you like. So long as you’re never called on to prove that you can, feel free to claim any skills you might want. What harm can it do?)

Lose Friends and Alienate People

If you appreciate the “loner” aspect of writing, you’re going to enjoy this avoidance tactic. If you make yourself as unpleasant to work with as possible, it won’t be long before even those few, hardy souls who offered you a writing gig will be running, screaming, in the other direction, swearing never, never again. Be rude. Be nasty. And if you get the chance in person, blow smoke in people’s faces. Soon, nobody will want to come within 50 feet of you or your cellphone and you will be left in blissful peace.

Don’t Follow Through

What if you have prospects who simply cannot be discouraged by generally obnoxious behavior? The next step is to be thoroughly unprofessional as well as obnoxious. Don’t return phone calls or emails. Never follow-up on a lead. Make promises and then neglect to keep them. If you can manage to add in long trip where you are completely inaccessible, or a houseful of teenagers who are constantly on your phone and computer, you get bonus points for originality.

Be a Bad Writer

This may be too obvious even to list, but if you are truly a bad writer, chances are you will easily avoid the hassle that comes with being successful and sought-after. If you’ve been coerced into agreeing to write something, then hand in truly shoddy, sub-standard work–writing that is not only bad, but is patently nowhere near the word count you promised. Misspellings and bad grammar are particularly useful, here, especially if you use the kind that would easily have been caught by the most basic of spell-check programs.

See? It’s just as easy to be unpublished and unhired in the non-fiction world as in the fiction world. All you need to do is follow these few, simple rules and you will have all the time to troll the internet and play video games that you want. It’s not like anybody is going to pay you to do anything else, right?