DYSKEUOMORPHS - anachronistic representations of flawed technologies, such as on-screen clocks that replicate the mechanical juddering of a second hand - fascinate Feedback (10 September 2011).
Tim Cross writes to remind us of a potential recruit to the club: the "snow" on untuned analogue TV sets. As terrestrial television switches to digital transmission, this is being replaced with plain blue screens.
The UK's last analogue TV transmitter, in Northern Ireland, is to be turned off on 24 October, rendering a whole range of metaphors outmoded. Tim points to the opening sentence of William Gibson's Neuromancer: "The sky above the port was the colour of a television, tuned to a dead channel." Once a cloudy grey, that will now be deep blue.
The film Poltergeist will become instantly quaint, depending as its plot does on analogue snow. Few of us will be ...
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