By better, I mean a higher quality experience, more worthwhile… Yes, I acknowledge there is good and bad TV and reading material. And responses will necessarily be largely subjective.
For some reason I am having difficulty expressing, I feel reading is a higher level more intellectual activity. Whereas TV in general impresses me as more passive.
An example: The other day, we watched about 90 minutes of TV, finishing off a series. I said I would like to read, feeling I had watched “enough” TV for the day. Shortly after, my wife asked if I wanted to watch a movie. I don’t know that I would feel 3.5 hours of reading “too much” for one day, but that much TV made me feel like too much.
For the point of this discussion, please consider what in your mind is equivalent “quality” of media. Don’t compare fine films to comic books, or great literature to trashy reality TV.
I’m confident that reading engages your mind more-so than watching TV, and for that reason, it is better. Watching TV is a more passive activity of the brain.
Reading is also better in that it stimulates your imagination much more than TV, where every scene and image is spoon fed to you by the director. When you read, you are the director and cinematographer.
There is a reason that TV has long been called the boobtube, as it takes minimal effort to engage and can be zoned out for long periods without missing much.
I have gone through phases where all I did was read, and you can’t zone out while reading. You either are reading or not. I’ve often read to the point of just dropping the book. It takes effort to process the information . I’m coming off of a long hiatus of not reading books, and it is taking a bit of effort to keep at it like I used to, but its much more enjoyable.
From a strictly intellectual standpoint, reading is better than TV. It is much more mentally engaging and has more positive long-term effects on the brain. But that’s not always the only thing that matters. Watching TV is often a shared experience, as you mention in your example:
In terms of your relationship, watching TV may be better than reading. Your relationship is probably stronger after a shared experience of watching TV compared to her watching TV in one room while you read in another. From an objective standpoint, there’s no reason your wife can’t watch the movie alone. She likely wants you with her because it makes her feel closer to you. So along these lines, if you’ve had too much TV, perhaps find some other shared activity you can do together, such as work on a puzzle, go for a walk, etc. That way she can get the companionship she desires and you don’t have to watch more TV than you want to.
Yeah - we rarely do that. We often read together in the same room, discussing what we are reading/have read. On somewhat rare occasions, one of us will really want to watch something the other is not interested in watching.
A separate but related question is, “Is book-writing a higher/more sophisticated art form than show-running?” Historically, when TV was a new form, most critics and discerning consumers would have said, “hell, yeah!” Now, with greater experience in film/video production, more opportunities, and the development of streaming, I think the answer is less clear. There is a lot of breathtakingly high quality art and documentation being produced in the form of film/videography. Surely the finest films and TV shows are not intrinsically of lesser value than the finest books and poetry.
I think that’s relevant, even though that isn’t what the OP asked. With the above duly noted, let’s hold up a really fine piece of literature and a critically acclaimed movie. Is consuming one better than the other?
Even though I am biased toward thinking that reading is better (I was raised on the motto that, “TV rots your brain,” and I haven’t fully rid myself of that attitude), a more honest answer is probably that they are different, and therefore offer different pluses and minuses.
Reading is probably intellectually harder, in some sense, and engages personal imagination more (if it’s fiction - probably less so if it’s non-fiction). But a movie allows us to think critically on dimensions not present in writing: for example, how good is the acting? What do we think of the cinematography?
At its core, the answer may involve valuing one art form more highly than another, and that’s not something I see as really legitimate.
Wow, good replies and I agree. My Wife and I read a lot, but will also watch an hour or so of TV a night.
Weekends are for chess and cribbage. Very much a shared experience. We are competitive, but not brutal. “You saw that you where going to lose your queen, but forgot about it. You might want to reconsider that last move” It depends on how far the game is along.
Great responses. Interesting to compare show running with authorship. Or how about writing for film? The one involves expressly presenting images/eliciting emotions in word, sight, and sound, whereas the other conjures up images/emotions from text. Very different activities.
I’m confused by the choice of the word “legitimate.” Are personal value judgements/preferences legitimate or not?
So far as relationship development, I think reading together would be even better than watching TV together, so long as you discuss what you read with your better half at some point. You could read the same book and share your interpretations, or read different books and share synopses. Just don’t cheat and hide your Archie comicbook inside your copy of Ulysses.
I no longer have a spouse, so I share what I read with my cats. They’re particularly fond of The Cat in the Hat.
Value judgments are welcome (to me, at least - I’m not an academic) in discussions of the relative merits of different art forms. I didn’t spend a lot of time choosing the word “legitimate” and I’m sure the sentiment could be reworded more elegantly and accurately. I guess what I’m trying to say is that MY value judgment is that both art forms are capable of expressing humanity equally well, so it is pointless to assert as a universal, unbending truth that one form is “better.” That certainly doesn’t preclude spirited debate over whether that assertion is valid.
Very much agreed. Which is why I intentionally phrased my OP somewhat vague-ish, acknowledging the subjective element, and stressing that each form covered a broad spectrum. Even hinting that there is such a “universal unbending truth” somewhat skews what I had hoped for from this thread.
Sorry - don’t mean to attack you and I truly appreciate your input. Just hoping (yeah - like that EVER happens!) to stave off the thread going in some direction that doesn’t really interest me.
Let’s look at it from the inside out. A single sentence from chapter 96 of Moby Dick:
“As they narrated to each other their unholy adventures, their tales of terror told in words of mirth; as their uncivilized laughter forked upwards out of them, like the flames from the furnace; as to and fro, in their front, the harpooneers wildly gesticulated with their huge pronged forks and dippers; as the wind howled on, and the sea leaped, and the ship groaned and dived, and yet steadfastly shot her red hell further and further into the blackness of the sea and the night, and scornfully champed the white bone in her mouth, and viciously spat round her on all sides; then the rushing Pequod, freighted with savages, and laden with fire, and burning a corpse, and plunging into that blackness of darkness, seemed the material counterpart of her monomaniac commander’s soul.”
This to describe a single thought - “So seemed it to me”.
I believe it is not possible to construct this sentence in a dramatic enactment. About as close as you can get is to have some actors ‘wildly gesticulating with huge pronged forks and dippers’. That entirely misses the point.
However, entertainment is a quality experience too and Melville might overkill describing a single play of a football game. In fact the above is kind of an allegory of a football play: trash talking linemen, the clash of the sides and the plunge of the ball. But I don’t care about all of that. I just want to see the Dolphins beat the Bills.
So, maybe it’s a wash. Reading is great and so is mindless video.
This is not inherently true of all TV; and the OP asked us to consider “equivalent quality.”
For the purposes of this thread, is there really a distinction between watching TV and watching movies? There used to be, in the Olden Days, when TV shows were more “disposable” (they’d crank out an episode a week, which people would watch once or twice if they managed to catch it when it was on), more low-budget, and less visually interesting (because people were watching on small, fuzzy screens). Nowadays, though, these limitations need no longer apply.
But this goes both ways: when watching TV (or movies), there’s more for you to process and appreciate and analyze, consciously or unconsciously—more meat for your mind to chew on: the performances, the settings, the cinematography, the music, the costumes, etc.
I’m a big fan of reading and generally prefer it to watching TV. But, as long as we’re careful to compare equal quality examples of both, as the OP stipulates, I don’t think it’s fair to call one “better” than the other; they’re just different.
No. I read much more than I watch. I try to learn something from most of the things I read. But learning is only one form of the human experience and many people read for pleasure and not purpose, which is fine. Most people retain more from reading paper than watching media. But I was more entertained by watching GoT than from reading the GRRM books.
Here are three differences that could be considered advantages to reading—things you get from reading that you don’t get from watching TV:
When you read, you experience direct, unfiltered communication from one mind to another. You are experiencing one person’s personal vision. By contrast, when you watch TV, you are experiencing a collaboration of many different people who all affect your experience in many different ways.
When you read, you control the pace at which you take in information: as fast or as slow as is optimal for you.
Reading can allow you to see the world from the point of view of another person, to experience the world through their eyes and to be privy to what’s going on in their mind. You get to temporarily, vicariously experience what it would be like to be someone else. When watching TV (or movies), you can only see the characters from the outside.
Good point. The wife and I just watched Wildcat. I’d say it compares favorably to a reading experience. I just finished At Dawn We Slept. Vastly different but the quality of the experience was similar. Both were thought provoking and informative.
So, there may be a class of printed material that equates to each class of video material from bottom to almost the top. At the top they diverge into different disciplines.