TV, cluttering our lives, minds and screens

Once upon a time, TV was a simple pleasure. You could enjoy its brain mushing images free of clutter with the exception of the few minutes of commercials peppered throughout strategically-timed breaks in the scripted action.

At this time, the image you watched on the screen looked much like this.Not too shabby. Hell, if you missed the commercials, you could even forget which network you were watching. Not a bad deal at all.

Then came FOX. The little network that could suddenly changed the game when they paid a sum equal to the gross domestic product of the former Soviet Union to broadcast NFL football. And their coverage featured an always-present FOX logo. The rest of the networks soon followed. Still, it was small, barely present and not too intrusive. Still tolerable. See...
Then the game changed again. Somebody decided that adding a recognizable element to an already recognizable logo would be the one-two punch to get stupid, slovenly Americans to remember that in four short years there would be endless hours of pre-taped figure skating to watch that took place halfway around the world. Pure genius they thought. And thus was born this...
Still, it was barely visible and confined to a relatively small portion of the screen. Tolerable.

Then the most desperate of the desperate major networks made a bold move. It happened over this very winter that continues to linger on. They added text to the bastardized cousin-fucking logo mash-up and suddenly the new abomination grew to one-third of the total height of the screen and it was less transparent and just more white in color. It went from tolerable to distracting in a few weeks. It serves no purpose other than to tell us that we should watch tomorrow. See, it sucks...
But the future is when things get ugly. Just look at my projection of on-screen TV logo/bug/info mash-ups just six months from now.
Scary.

But it gets worse. Look at late 2009's screen clutter. Simply maddening.