The office of the Seattle City Council has announced that a special meeting of the Energy and Technology committee will be held on Thursday, January 29th at 2:00 PM [AGENDA]. Two items on the agenda are of particular interest:

Item 6. Winter Storm Response: The Council will discuss purchasing snowplow equipment to mount on existing City Light trucks, after a briefing. There is no public debate scheduled for this item, but I’ve no doubt there is plenty of public interest, after the fiascos of this winter.

Item 11. Digital Television Transition: After a briefing, the council will discuss their policy on the transition, as well as their plan for informing the public about the transition.

I think the general public is pretty well informed about the transition; the question is, does the public care? My household contains several of the 6.5% residents “not ready for the Digital Television Transition,” according to the Council, because we have a really old TV and have not bought a converter. And we don’t plan to, so we are totally and completely prepared to not have television programs broadcast into our home.

What I’m wondering is, Why does government want me to watch television? I’ve heard the arguments about emergency notification, et cetera– they are thinner than cheap sushi, and smell worse.

The language in the various Federal documents is questionable: the request to delay the transition that was submitted to President Obama’s Transition Team (the document is no longer available for viewing, since the switch from www.change.gov to www.whitehouse.gov), stated that Americans would be denied a resource upon which we had “always” depended. Except that the nation is over 200 years old; television has only been around for about 100, and didn’t become common in the US until the late 1940′s. Is it entirely inconceivable that TV is a fad, an outmoded technology, an expiring method of communication that is only useful for advertising? Should Federal or municpal government be so involved in citizens’ lives that they offer coupons and mount public information campaigns about what is, essentially, a private entertainment choice, like buying a Wii or Scrabble Deluxe?

What do you think?