I had an interesting conversation with my five year-old today that I thought I would share.
To put it into context, I grew up in a one-television house. I thought I would raise my kids in a one-television house. We do only have one television but we have several computers with various sized-monitors and we have Netflix which is basically having a television in every room since several of the computers are laptops. That was a recent insight. The computer monitors begin at eleven inches and go up from there. We often play Scooby movies on the largest monitor with the best speakers for the kids, thinking this is what they would want.
Today, I asked my daughter if she wanted to finish a movie she was watching a few days ago on Netflix. She said sure but she wanted to watch it on my “little” computer (Dell 11″ Inspiron). I asked why. She said it wasn’t as scary when it was that small. She would probably enjoy a 7 inch screen but there isn’t much practical use for that in the house so no deal.
My husband and I watched Transformers 2 in the theater. The screen wasn’t huge but it was big enough to make each action sequence very exciting. My husband put it on his Netflix queue and it arrived so he plunked it in forgetting we had already watched it. It wasn’t as exciting — it wasn’t almost toyish in the presentation of the Transformer changes from car to non-car character. It almost looked like a cartoon.