Twenty seconds ago I was curled up in my cozy bed unwinding for the evening. I have just started reading The Assault on Reason by good ol' Al Gore. I haven't even made it through the introduction and I feel compelled to spill my thoughts out and since I live alone and no one wants to be awoken at this hour with a political phone conversation (oh, and I realized that I had forgotten to take my evening fruit salad of pills thanks to undeclared war in Iraq) ... here I am.
I don't mean to steal someone elses words, but - I never really made an active decision that I wouldn't own a television, I've just never had one. It was never meant to be a political statement, but you can't help but make one through the absence of a television.
Gore draws a fascinating connection between the American addiction to television and the utter decay of our democracy. I won't kill you with the details (after all, details are what we don't have time for anymore because we can get all the information we believe we need through a thirty second broadcast), (sorry for the aside) but I found myself really feeling a lot of truth in some of his conclusions. Ironically enough I had my bedroom window open and can hear my neighbor's television blaring a sitcom across the street. I stopped reading and thought about why they had that show on at ten p.m. Here are some of the reasons I came up with:
1) escapism - we believe that watching a fake life or a fake-reality-TV show gives us a chance to breathe from our own stresses.
2) loss of faith in entertaining ourselves - when I go over to a friend's house the first thing that tends to happen is the television is turned on or a movie popped in... I think we do this because we believe that we can't interact in a fun enough way. When really I actually want to spend time with that person. I don't care if it's throwing sticks for the dogs to chase off the deck or playing scrabble or looking at pictures or laughing about gossip or planning out house projects. I think this is also why we watch when we're alone. The "I'm bored" syndrom. There are so many amazing things outside, in your house, visiting with a neighbor, walking around the block, listening to music, cooking, canoodling with someone special (or not special for that matter), conversing with a friend, any of the zillions of hobbies out there... the list goes on and on and on and... but when we come home from work, why do we reach for the zone out box?? Seriously, if you're reading this and have thoughts, please throw them up here!
3) habit - I think this is the most prevalent and scariest reason of all
4) because you actually like the show - yup, there is some funny stuff out there
5) to get the news - fair enough
But in all fairness, if reasons 4 and 5 were how we spent even one third of our television viewing time we would be unbelievably happy and educated. Can you believe that the AVERAGE person watches 4 hours, 30 minutes of television A DAY!!! We have lost our damn minds.
Sunday, July 13, 2008
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Given 3 (habit), the rest of the reasons really don't matter. Television is largely advertiser funded. The content is therefore largely advertiser controlled. Advertising is the science of convincing people to take an action that may be against their own well-thought-out self interest, and it works. Of course it's addictive.
Amusing Ourselves to Death, by Neil Postman, covers the topic quite well, originally published in 1985.
Lastly, if you want to talk politics at 10pm, pick up the phone.
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