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I turned on the television the other day. Nothing weird about that, you may say. But you don’t understand – I actually watched TV. For the past four or five years, the flat-screen TV hanging on the wall of my apartment has merely been an extension of my laptop. Anything I watch, I stream on the Internet: movies, serial dramas, documentaries, or music videos. But what this means is that I tend to binge-watch more, which in turn means less variety. When I was young, watching TV with my parents on an evening meant being exposed to many different forms of entertainment. We’d watch a soap opera, then maybe a quiz show, then the news, then a police or hospital drama, then maybe a wildlife show, and then a film, which is when my father would inevitably fall asleep. (He has a frustrating habit of nodding off within the first 10 minutes and waking up just as the end credits start rolling, only to ask, “What happened?”) Those days are long gone, it seems. Today, I can spend an evening watching an entire season of Mad Men, or episode upon episode of the BBC family comedy Outnumbered. I’ve lost count of the amount of times my wife has asked me, “Haven’t you watched this one already?” I probably have, yes – many times. So the other night, I switched on the TV, grabbed the remote, steeled myself for the unknown and went old-school flipping. I started in safe territory: China Central Television’s sports channel was showing a replay of a European soccer match from the previous weekend. It was 2-0. The commentators repeated haoqiu until they’d truly diminished its meaning. | 
