The end of immediacy

On Saturday I was watching a rugby match (Otley versus Cornish Pirates) which if not technically one of the best games of rugby I've ever seen was certainly one of the most exciting. It being a game of rugby union played by one amateur and one semi-pro team towards the bottom of National Division One in front of a few hundred people at Cross Green the match did not warrant TV coverage, although I discovered later that BBC Radio Cornwall had turned up to cover it.

The lack of TV coverage caught me out several times, because - it eventually dawned on me - a live sporting event which no-one is videoing has no action replay. You actually have to pay attention to the game as it happens, or you miss it forever. This is not a thing, I realise, I can any longer do with ease. Sport is watched with half an eye while one muses on other things, only paying complete attention if something remarkable happens and only then in the expectation that it can then be seen and re-seen from a dozen angles over the course of several minutes. And so I...didn't quite miss, as such, our first spectacular breakaway try, or the Pirates try just before half time that ultimately cost us the game. But it never really occured to me to properly focus on them until it was too late.

Everyone bemoans our dwindling attention spans, and it is normal enough to blame the Internet because, well, we like blaming the Internet for things. But this isn't an Internet phenomenon. This is clearly and simply caused by TV. I have lost the connection between watching a sporting event and the now of the thing. I cannot muster any sense of immediacy because I have been trained to expect replay after replay. So on Saturday I watched one of the most exciting games of rugby I've ever seen, and even as it was happening realised that I was missing quite a lot of it.