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National TV Turn Off Week
beforewisdom writes "Next week (April 19th - 25th 2004) is National TV Turn Off Week in the USA. Among the many benefits claimed by tvturnoff.org is that 90% of the people who participate in a TV Turnoff Week successfully reduce the amount of television they watch permanently."
According to this previous slashdot article, we are watching less TV anyway. Especially now that the summer is getting close, TV viewing will drop even more. I guess soon enough somebody will start a National turn off the Internet Surfing week. I could turn off the TV a lot easier than staying off the web.
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Retail Retreat
I don't watch nearly the amount of TV that everyone else seems to. When I moved to Minnesota in November of 2002 I didn't get cable. Comcast gets enough of my money being that they are the only broadband ISP that is economically feasible... Without watching TV for 80% of my daily free time I have found that:
1. I enjoy the outside more than ever. I even have become accustomed to Minnesota winters and don't really mind when it is -10 or warmer.
2. I have a lot more free time to keep my apartment clean, cook better and more interesting dinners, and enjoy the company of REAL PEOPLE. Remember, Fahrenheit 451 is getting closer and closer every day with the advent of more and more time/brain sucking material on the TV.
3. I have found a lot of other interests that I normally wouldn't have. Currently those include reading, geocaching, and drinking. I think I get more out of those activities than listening to terrible singers make terrible renditions of terrible songs.
4. I have $50/month more to spend on other things that I enjoy to do (i.e. food, drinking, girlfriend, etc).
5. The knowledge that I am not wasting away, in my apartment, for five hours a night being fed with push content by large conglomerates that have only the size of their pockets to worry about.
As I have mentioned before, my favorite part of TV is that the government has mandated (with our tax dollars) HDTV to be used. Forcing it to be placed into sets in the future so that we can all double pay for it. Now they realize that we are all fat because we sit on our dead, dying, asses and watch TV. So get out and do something but make sure you pay more taxes to support better TV signals!
I am looking forward to advocating that others I know do this. Perhaps, if we try, we can get rid of the Reality TV non-sense and promote a healthier lifestyle (physically, mentally, and socially). It's unlikely but at least we can try.
This sounds like another correlation vs. causality fallacy: is it not at least as likely that those who are willing to turn off their TV sets for a week are likely to be those who have already gotten sick of TV? Why the addiction implication?
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Here's the scary thing: the longer you go without watching, the more all the shows REALLY SUCK when you try to start again. I once swore off TV for a month (the second week was the hardest). When the month was over, I found that all the shows were stupid, the laugh-tracks were annoying, and there were no good, original stories. Since then, I pretty much only watch Discovery/History channels with a rare forray into the SciFi channel. When we move in the next few months, I won't be taking cable with me (except the Roadrunner part).
Yeah, right.
I got a 36" Sony XBR and a Tivo and got sucked in. Sopranos, HBO boxing on Saturday nights, started watching the NHL playoffs (last year). I knew it was bad. I knew I was going down the "joe six-pack" road. Started laying off the bike and gym to play a little Xbox and watch a game. It was keeping me from my SANS studies. I knew I needed a plan.
I saw this article on CNN last year, and went out and got that stuff. Sold the Sony, sold the integrated tuner/Tivo. Hooked it up to a low cost DirecTV tuner only and dish.
I started watching TV in a window on my computer. Slowly, I started backgrounding the window, and would IRC, and then code a little, and then slowly, started using it less and less. The software still gave me the Tivo function, so I could take a break and still FF through commercials.
I highly recommend this approach. Get the fucking big box out of the house. Re-arrange your furniture. Spend the money on a good monitor, 21" or larger, non-plasma. Get the tuner card. Wean yourself off. If you have a family or SO that enjoys "movie night" - do them and yourself a favor. Go to the cinema. Get the hell out of the house.
The side effect is that I dont live in quite the same world as everyone else, and I am totally not influenced by televised events, so I often do not have the same reaction to things as my co-workers. I never saw the images from 9/11 until weeks afterward. Life was the same for me, before and after, but everyone else around me adopted new postures on life. It was wild. Nothing in their life had changed either, but they went mental. The iraq war did more to change actual life instead of virtual life, becuase some of them have kids over there. Thats reality.
This reality TV, this Trump thing going on - it has precious little impact on me. I know it's going on but I dont watch it, I dont see the ads, the companies paying for that ad time dont get me.
I hate TV becuase I consider it to be a tool of government and corporate control and I dont want to be affected. So I dont have a TV in my house and I dont watch. I live a different life becuase of that and my choice I've made.
... turning off your TV?
I cancelled my TV subscription when I moved house about 4 years ago, and have resisted getting a TV in ouir new home. My wife took about 3 months to adapt, but survived. I rediscovered my evenings.
TV is very close to a drug. I guess it provides many people with a virtual social exposure with no interaction: sitting still, getting bombarded with faces and voices is kind of bizarre when you think of it. Since program makers can't increase the amount consumed (limited hours in a day), they increase the dose by making TV ever more intense.
Turning of my TV was hard, very much like stopping drinking coffee or alcohol, but worthwhile for me.
Ceci n'est pas une signature
One reason that I don't watch television is because of all the awful advertising. It seems like for every three minutes of programming there are two minutes of commercials.
One of the best channels on TV is Noggin. From 6 am to 6 pm, it's kids' programming with no commericials. Instead, they have songs, little games, or "mini-shows" between the major programs. (They run advertising the other 12 hours when they're programming for older kids.)
This, of course, has conditioned my kids to be adverse to advertising. One day, we let my older son stay up to watch some animated show on another channel. Everytime a commericial came on, he kept asking if the show was over. We had to explain what the commericials were. He seemed to become thoroughly unimpressed with the idea of someone interrupting his show with other stuff.
On a side note, I think Noggin is a great example of how you can make something in TV/cable/satellite that people would actually be willing to pay good money for. The only reason I have my existing level of cable service is because of Noggin. If they didn't have it, I'd have almost nothing beyond the basic/extended package.
-- Fugacity: Confusing chemists since 1908
I've always been a little confused by the anti-TV sentiment here. Everyone says "there's nothing to watch, all tv is garbage." What about...
Stargate SG-1
The Simpsons (sharks or not)
Malcolm
Chapelle
South Park
24 (Thanks for that 7-week break, fox. Way to ruin the momentum.)
Enterprise
Scrubs (funniest show on tv, maybe ever)
Justice League (never saw it ? try it.)
Smallville
Crank Yankers
Aqua teen hunger force
That's just the new stuff. Tivo has been picking up plenty of oldschool Sci-fi lately, especially Quantum Leap, Sliders, and Hulk (Bill Bixby). SG1 reruns are on constantly for those who haven't caught on to it yet. There's new Family Guys coming, reruns of that and Futurama on CN. Seinfeld, Simpsons are on constantly. Clone wars just ended, and was pretty interesting.
So... what's the problem ? Get a tivo if you need to. I don't even have HBO, and half the shows mentioned in this thread as "top quality tv" are on HBO. You've got options.
I gave up tv several years ago.
My Mom, unfortunately, bought me a set for Christmas when I moved into an apartment. I say "unfortunately" because my wife is now addicted to tv, and I can't stand the thing, personally.
After the Army, everything changed for me. I had been there, done that in a very big way. After college, I became aware of how positively assinine the programming was:
Television really doesn't offer me anything anymore.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
You want to know whats wrong with television?
... at issue is the acutal substance of the argument, not its emotinal or superficial appeal. The peripheral route refers to attempts in which the change in the brain is associated with positive stimuli - like a sports star or musician - that actually have nothing to do with the substace."
:
Fine.
Here it is:
A television screen works by scanning a picture onto a matrix of "dots", and a standard TV has 512 of these dots. At no time is there every a picture displayed on the screen, but rather each dot is sequentially scanned many times per second. The senses are able to correlate that data very quickly and form a picture. This is based on the Gestalt principle, which says that elements that are similar and congruent will be brought together.
The funny thing is, the way the picture is displayed seems to hypnotize people. Scientific studies have shown that, within about 10 seconds of watching TV, the brain slips out of alpha waves and into beta waves (like you're sleeping). The right half of the brain (the logical half) literally shuts off, and the TV engages the left, emotional half. This basically shortcircuits normal, rational thought, allowing for the television to establish subtle emotional reactions and attach them to whatever they wish, normally a product, maybe a politician, always an ideology.
In social psychology there is an effect known by the Elaborative Likelihood Model. This states : "persuasion can take either a central or a peripheral route. The central route requirs a person to think critically about the argument
Seeing as television naturally turns off the central route, advertisers literally have an interface into your brain. Famous adman Tony Schwartz said the key to advertising on television is striking "the resonant chord", meaning to get you to buy a product, or think about it next time you're shopping, you just have to hit that one key, attach that one emotion, and the sale is made. Adbusters has created a slogan based on this effect : "The product is you". Advertisers basically pay for the opportunity to strike that chord. You're emotions and ideals get really fucked up in the process.
It can be insidious. Product placement is a very real concern, because as you are in your "relaxing, disposable, laugh-filled" mood when watching Letterman, its very easy to make you think things you normally wouldnt, and have you make associations that are invalid. People like you are the perfect consumer, the perfect pawn, the perfect mark, because you have no idea what you are getting into when you flick on the idiot box.
I'll leave you with this quote, from a very wise man whose name escapes me at the moment
"Be very careful with what you put into your head, because you'll never, ever get it out."
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-- "Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains." Jean Jacques Rousseau