Last year I canceled our cable because we couldn’t afford it at the time. We got no channels at all (although we still borrowed DVDs and videos from the library). It was wonderful. Life seemed so much calmer. The house really began to feel like a haven. It had always been my desire to give up TV anyway, and I think it was really a great thing for us.
Unfortunately, we have cable again now. My mom moved in with me and she “can’t do without”. I rarely watch, because I’ve gotten out of the habit, but of course we have the constant noise in the background and the kids are sucked right into it.
I’m getting married next year to a man who likes his TV. His kids even have TVs in their rooms! Oh well, I’ll always have my memories…
Amen to that! I find books to be “active” whereas TV is “passive” entertainment. I need look no further for proof than my roomie who has often told me that he doesn’t have the energy to read so he just watches TV.
Much of my post-college life has been broadcast and cable TV-free. I had a TV set, but no attenae or cable. I only used it to watch videos. Then, when the second gulf war started, my roomie had to get cable so he could watch war footage. I quite often think that the quality of my life has suffered because I can get sucked into a TV program so easily. I’m less productive, and get less sleep because the the TV keeps me up too late.
And MANDA JO, I think you are onto something there. It surely can’t be good listening all day to advertisers telling you that you lack all the qualities that good, successful people have.
That’s because people who read tend to choose more challenging books.
I read challenging books, and trashy airport novels, and everything inbetween… the same with my TV watching: sometimes it’ll be a high-brow arts programme, sometimes The Simpsons.
And for watching sport there’s no susbtitute (save from being there, obviously) for watching a big footie game with a load of mates.
If you pick stimulating programmes, you will be stimulated… same as if you read stimulating books. I can think of plenty of books I’ve read that have bored me to tears as much as any TV programme.
Interesting factoid: it’s said that watching TV can (for some people) burn less calories than simply staring at a blank wall.
When I was a teenager I stopped watching TV because I noticed it making me unhappy. It was mostly music videos that made me constantly think I needed a bigger chest and a more even tan and whiter teeth and nicer clothes. I noticed that every time I watched it I felt like I could never really relax because even with things like sitcoms, I definitely watched it from the point of view of trying to learn something about how to be or what things should be like.
I started to watch it again in my 20s when I realized you could just watch a show and then turn it off when it was over. I used to watch Xena and I just loved it. Then Oz and now Arrested Development and the Apprentice. Usually somebody tells me to watch a show or I read about it and then I only watch that one show. Or I get the DVDs of the show.
TV is weird because it’s like a person with a terrible personality. It’s like its own culture and in Canada you don’t even know if it’s US culture or if it’s just TV culture. It gives me a bad case of xenophobia though. I see it in my minds eye as some grown up party where you picutre a bunch of people like Paris Hilton, George Bush, Oprah, that girl from Trading Spaces and a mom from Iowa all sit on a white shag carpet watching Angelina Jolie tell a story about how her dog makes a funny face when it poos and then lazer beams shoot out of everyone teeth and then some people in wal-mart uniforms usher in naked Jessica Simpson and everyone snorts coke off her naked breasts while Dave Chappelle sits in the corner weeping for humanity with his all-seeing eyes. Then the Barefoot Contessa comes in with goat cheese snacks and two skinny 19 year old male models who have been kept in the forrest for 12 weeks with shag haircuts wearing distressed designer clothes and fight to the death and the winner gets an X-Box. In the background, someone young wearing a lot of eyeliner is taking a dump on a DVD biography of Winston Churchill.
I’ve never done acid but TV makes me feel like I did. I just feel alienated from the whole culture. I’d rather just avoid it. Yeah it makes me unhappy. Even without watching it a lot I get this terrible view of the world. I don’t like to think of the world that way and I don’t like to imagine a whole population enjoying that crazy circus. Maybe it’s my fault for not watching it more and making an effort to find the less lurid side.
Wonderful post, pokey! I’m glad you got over learning how to be or what things should be like from TV before you started watching Arrested Development and The Apprentice.
Dear Rest of the World,
No, what you see on TV is not what the USA is really like.
Thanks,
USA
P.S. Just because they call it a “reality show” doesn’t mean it has anything to do with Reality.
Sure, if you’re after short-term happiness. But everyone knows the real answer to remaining happy for the rest of your life is to never make a pretty woman your wife.
Don’t blame the television for your own bad habits. Giving up watching television is like giving up reading books; you’re throwing out the good with the bad. Buy a television, learn what’s on, and watch better shows - you’ll discover there are good shows being broadcast that are worth your time. Just remember that doing too much of anything is a bad idea.
I think its funny that people who dont have/watch TV trumpet it like they accomplished something. Not a slam to those people, I just find it amusing.
In any case, I look at TV viewing like I do everything else in life…moderation. Nothing is good for you if you overdue it. People should look more for a balance between say Books, TV, and Radio. All have something to offer, but none should be your only source of information or stimulation.
TiVo is one of those things that you don’t know that you need, but you do. It lets you watch quality programming WHEN you want - while avoiding all the needless crap. Plus, with the wave of your remote control you can dash straight through the commercials!
God bless TiVo! I read when I want, I go outside when I want, and (thanks to TiVo) I watch TV when I want.
Peter Wiggen.
p.s. end hijack / blatant TiVo pimping
p.p.s. I have noticed, however, that I am more apt to turn on the TV now that I can watch all the great shows that I love. This might eat into my reading time, but I have not found it to be too distracting.
There’s probably something to what Manda JO says about advertising. That stuff is designed to screw us up enough that we’ll buy crap products, and hours and hours of attempts to demolish our self-esteem to the point where we’ll buy anything they throw at us have to have an effect eventually. Even the heightening of desire can lead to greater unhappiness.
But I think there’s something in the medium itself. That passive state, hours wasted, absorbing information, feeling like you can’t move. That state of emptiness, of helplessness, of addiction, that TV produces is, in my mind, psychologically damaging.
And I also have to echo Mangetout – it makes you a social misfit, not owning a TV, but you’re still happier. Not owning a TV makes you instantly an outsider looking in on this culture. You never see how people’s political opinions, needs, desires, and beliefs are formed by television – their priorities set – until you’re the one without.
In a Scientific American article a few years ago, I read that the average American loses 9 years of their life to television, and that television withdrawal produces similar symptoms to withdrawal from physically addictive substances. I believe it because, when we lost our last TV 5 or 6 years ago, that’s exactly what happened. I was staring at a blank screen for awhile each day, becoming fidgety.
By the time I could afford one again, the symptoms had passed, and I was feeling better. Never went back. Anything worth watching, I rent and play it on my computer, and that’s rarely more than one every month or two. I always do it in a group – watching TV alone is like drinking alone. And I never watch TV that includes commercials (you can skip by these with a DVD).
It is an achievement; I gave up a fairly heavy smoking habit just like that (<clicks fingers>), I know I find TV a much harder habit to break. I also know I don’t really enjoy or even really need it that much.
Well, I’ve been without cable or antenna (just the occasional video rental) since 1996, and I don’t miss TV at all.
So am I happier or, more specfically, am I less apt to waste time and succumb to electronically induced enervation? Not at all, because of the internets.
Those damn *internets * tempt the addictive, compulsive, channel-surfing, short-term-pleasure-seeking sick side of my soul every bit as much as TV ever did. Maybe even more, because (1) I can enjoy *the internets * at work and home alike, and (2) there are, shall we say, fewer content restrictions on the internets.
Similar situation here. I do have a TV, but no workable signal, so it’s just for DVDs and videos. If it weren’t for the videos I’d get rid of the TV and not have to pay a TV licence for TV I can’t watch - DVDs I can watch on the computer. But I spend a lot of time messing around on the internet. As a teenager, I stayed up stupidly late watching stupid programmes; now I stay up stupidly late reading threads and articles that have no direct relevance to my life.
I did get a lot from some of the programmes I watched. TV can be active if you want it to be. You can watch something, think about it, focus on certain parts; the very fact that two viewers can get a different impression from the same programme indicates that they are actively parsing the information they receive. That applies for any programme, but documentaries and the like require far more cognitive activity.
The only real difference with the internet is that it will talk back. I have also met a lot of people from the internet (maybe 300 people), and that isn’t true for television. The internet has a social facility which TV doesn’t.
TV does give you the potential to talk about the shows with your friends and colleagues, but hardly any of my friends watch TV anyway, and I know enough about shows such as ‘Big Brother’ just from reading about them online.
Has anyone else noticed a generational difference with regard to TV viewing habits? People around my age and younger (I’m 29) have TV as a very small part of their lives. But for our parents and anyone 40+ it tends to be as essential as electric light.
Then there’s the next generation. My daughter very, very rarely watches TV, and it’s usually the BBC, with no ads, at other people’s houses. Among her friends she’s not that unusual in watching little TV (though I get the impression that most of them watch some at least). Most of them go to afterschool club and if you’re at afterschool club till 6 and bedtime is at 7.30 there’s just not much time for TV - and then it’s probably the Simpsons or a DVD, because kids’ TV is over by then.
Could this lack of exposure to televison, and in particular TV with adverts, be a way in which the kids of working parents actually benefit? Of course, non-working parents can choose not to let the kids watch much TV, but if you’re with the kids a lot there’s far more reason to let them watch CBeebies while you get on with other things.
My daughter’s very unmaterialistic and I attribute this partly to lack of exposure to advertising. I hear other people talk about children demanding certain specific toys for Christmas, and she asked for ‘a CD game’ and ‘a toy.’ She hasn’t even heard of … whatever the current trendy expensive toy is. She and her friends play imaginative games, love skipping ropes and art and run around a lot outside. Would they do that if they were used to vegging out in front of a TV?
(FTR, this isn’t a group of middle-class hippies - this is in one of the most economically-deprived areas in the UK.)
Apologies for what turned out to be a tangent-filed thesis. Maybe I should start my own thread.
Very insightful post, but I think they accounted for that in the second part of the study. People who had lots of spare time - retirees etc - did not have their happiness affected by watching TV as much as those who had busier lives. Assuming the number and type of ads watched by both groups was much the same, their conclusion is that the depressing effect is caused by a realisation that you are wasting you life and had better things to do, but were not doing them.
That said, both groups were somewhat depressed and you could easily chalk up that to the effect of ads, as you say. I do suspect that women’s magazines - ads and editorial content - have a similar effect on Western women in a similar way, inducing insecurity and dissatisfaction as a marketing tool.
There is a fairly famous psychology study that showed a correlation between hours of TV watched and the level of people feeling that the world is an unsafe place. Sometimes I wonder how much you could affect people’s minds and habits if you had total control of TV content. I don’t watch TV (not bragging, just saying). I don’t want to fill my mind with useless crap. Now if I could only stop surfing the internet!
Television, aimlessly searching the internet, videogames essentially make you feel like you are busy doing something productive when in reality you are just sitting around doing nothing. In the short term, they feel good, or at the very least they keep you occupied from feeling bad for awhile and that’s fine. Too much though, and you can find that you have few if any real relationships, hobbies or other activities. That can lead to depression.
Now unlike videogames or the Internet, TV can actually make you feel bad (although I read something about too much Internet time leading to depression). You are looking at the world through a lense where everyone seems so much trendier, funnier and more beautiful, their lives are so much more exciting. Their appartments are so much bigger and nicer. Unless they are meant to be held up for ridicule, every parent is a doctor or lawyer or magazine editor or some other highly paid professional. IMHO, this is a more insideous effect than advertising, which most people have learned to tune out anyway. How would you expect to feel if you were constantly shown images of people living more interesting lifestyles?
But no cable or antenna.