Back in the days when the TV was a "box" not a "display," when "boob tube," "idiot box" and "vast wasteland" were synonyms for the most powerful medium of the 20th Century (we weren't being ironic, either) the very symbol of television shallowness was the laugh track. Few artifacts of communication history so well embody media condescension to its audience. Programmers not only gave us tepid situation comedies; they tried to convince us the shows were funny by piping in canned laughter. True videophiles, get your checkbook ready. At an auction gallery in California this weekend (June 25-26) two of …

Well, now I am going to have to dig that long-unused Xbox Kinect full-body controller out of its box somewhere and reconnect the gadget that took last holiday shopping season by storm. Frankly, after jumping my way through a few test games, me and my family pretty much forgot about that black bar and mess of extra wires sitting beneath our HDTV. And when we moved our home a month ago and didn't' unpack the Kinect, no one seemed to notice. But this week in Cannes, Microsoft gave me a reason to reconnect my Kinect, at least for another test …

How do you feel about your TV, your desktop and your mobile screens? No, how do you really feel? At Cannes this week, during the 58th Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, BBDO and Microsoft introduced new research that tries to get under our skins, into our heads, and behind even our emotions about our multi-screen lives. The multi-national survey of 15,000 consumers in five countries tries to find how we connect emotionally to TV, Web and mobile.

Late last week, Intel and its agencies Tribal DDB and DDB Hong Kong released an elaborate interactive video adventure on YouTube that is aimed at promoting the feature sets of the newest Intel Core processors. You are the hero in this fast-paced first-person thriller. You meet up with a striking young female agent and help her elude two badasses who are in hot pursuit. There are interactive fighting and shooting sequences as well as puzzles that need to be solved to advance the action.

When I was a kid, my parents screamed for me to turn of the damned TV and go outside to play. It was a ploy and we all knew it. Mom and Pop just wanted to watch their own shows. Decades later I tell my daughter to turn down the damned video clips from her laptop while her father is trying to watch TV. There is a weird justice to this. My parents thought TV would turn me into a boob, whether they had the metrics to back it up or not. I confess to a small tugging fear that …

If you are trying to grab the attention of small businesses with a branded entertainment play, then an office situation dramedy seems like a no-brainer. But can it work? Given the wooden delivery, hit or miss writing and almost mandatory bad timing that occupies most webisodics, one wouldn't expect much from a series produced by a small business insurer targeting SMBs and their entrepreneurial streak. But "Leap Year," from Hiscox Small Business Insurance and its agency, CJP Digital Media is surprisingly good.

The Internet TV habit has grabbed hold of Americans in just a few short years of streaming prime time onto anytime access. And while we still don't have a firm sense of whether the proverbial "cable cutting" is occurring in any appreciable way, the video natives are growing restless. This is some of what I take away from the latest Harris Interactive poll taken with Adweek about use and attitudes toward the Web's relationship to TV.

We're not sure how "user-generated" the Michael Jackson "Behind the Mask" Project can claim to be when it launches this morning on the late pop singer's Facebook page. The idea was to piece together snippets of fan-made and uploaded video snippets into a video that was spun off of the song collection released late last year and selling 3 million units, according to Epic records. For the past few months, fans were sent to a page on the Behind the Mask site to choose from highly specific assignments and suggestions for what to record and upload.

Can Justin Bieber strike twice now that every boyish, sexually non-threatening mophead in America is posting his hummings to YouTube? Back in the days of Bobby Sherman and Tiger Beat, teen heartthrobs were built by TV studios and record companies who knew exactly when a secondary character (anyone remember Sherman's stuttering brother role on Here Come the Brides?) was attracting fan mail. The wave of talk show appearances, bad records and summer TV spin-off shows commenced to hit while the iron was hot.

Las Vegas has done such a good job of establishing its own naughty mystique, you wonder why anyone would want to mess with it. After all, "What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas," has become one of the catchphrases of our culture and a remarkable example of wink-and-a-nod messaging. Don't worry, the subtext implies, we will cover your ass. In what other city does one leave feeling almost guilty if you didn't cross some line somewhere? So it is curious that Vegas.com comes into the municipal branding fray with a new campaign that highlights people's transparent tall tales about coming …