I moved about a year ago. I donated the TV to Goodwill, and for various reasons, never got another one. My average day/week no longer includes watching TV, though occasionally I’ll see a little bit somewhere. I don’t seem to miss it. No withdrawal symptoms, no shaking, tremors, or sneaking out at night to hang out at Circuit City or Best Buy’s Electronics Department, etc.
But I think there has been a side effect.
I think I’m finding a broader range of female body types to be attractive, and the median attractive weight has gone up, I think.
On the other hand, maybe it’s because I’ve moved to a fatter part of the country.
I’ve done the experiment, for periods longer than a year, and one side effect to look out for is intellectual snobbery. I began to look down on the TV watchers, those mindless zombies.
If it weren’t for South Park, I might be ruling the Earth by now.
Heh. I didn’t own a TV set for the first 30+ years of my life, even after living with and marrying my normal wife. Her family even gave us a TV (assuming we’d just forgotten to get one ourselves, I guess), and I gave it away to a friend. Finally, she put her foot down and we got a TV, but no cable. After a year, I subscribed us to cable for the express purpose of getting South Park.
Such an evil device this box. It sucks more of my life away than an opiate addiction.
I gave it up for good about 5 years ago. Don’t miss it at all.
I’ll visit a friend’s house to watch the World Series or the Superbowl. Perhaps twice a year when I’m traveling I’ll turn on the TV in the motel/hotel room and surf around the channels for a couple of hours. I nearly always come away with the impression that it’s worse than what I remember.
I didn’t own a TV until I was 34. After I left home, I didn’t see much TV at all until somebody gave me a portable that was left behind in an apartment. So you can’t miss what you never had, right? My in-laws gave us a TV when we were first married, as they are the kind of people who wouldn’t know what to do with themselves without one. I still don’t watch it.
It doesn’t occur to me to wonder what’s on, and there are no shows that I watch with any kind of regularity. I see the TV during dinner, and then it’s on HGTV.
I stopped watching TV when I started college. Anything I want to watch that is or used to be shown on TV (such as Star Trek or House), I download. No commercials.
We killed our TV about 6 years ago – which means we haven’t had TV all century. We just don’t miss it, and we’re far better informed. We get our news on the net, and get streaming video of the ‘best of’ TV and commercials. I may or may not turn on the TV in the hotel when I travel – I like to watch South Park and The Daily Show, but I’m not upset if I miss them. For months. Or years.
I highly recommend that everyone do the same. We have so much more time to spend together, and do things we like. We still spend time in front of the tube, watching movies on DVD. No commercials, and we can stop and start at our leisure. We’ve accumulated a large library of great movies, and we’ve still saved money vs. paying for cable or a dish.
As far as changing my acculturated tastes in women, I think aging has done more than lack of TV. Basically the upper age of attractiveness keeps rising, while the lower range remains the same.
At one point, my family owned six televisions. There are eight rooms in our house.
It’s actually not as bad as it sounds. We had just bought a new TV for the living room, and the old one was still around. My brothers had also replaced the television they play console games on in their bedroom. There was another one that had belonged to my late grandmother, just hanging out in storage. They couldn’t be removed because it was an icy January, and it was too dangerous to carry TVs to the dump. There are now only three televisions in our house: the family one, the one in my parents’ bedroom, and my brother’s gaming TV. I realize this is quite a few to some people, but after six, it feels like nothing.) Incidentally, I stopped watching TV after I came to college.
If we had cable/satellite I’d sit on my ass all day watching FoxNews and the History Channel.
My mom will tape some shows for me, though – I kinda like “The Office” for example. I like this system better this way, though — I can watch it when I want, and I can fast forward through the commercials.
I think internet is killing the TV star, though. I spend as much time online as some TV watchers do in front of the tube (this’ll change come Thursday, and even more so after I graduate).
I think it’s because when you’re online you can pretty much control what you see, so you’re constantly being hit with stuff that interests you. And plus you can see whatever you want, whenever you want – meanwhile unless you have TiVo or are able to tape your “stories,” you’re stuck watching stuff when it comes on rather than when it’s convenient.
This is a more complex issue than might first appear:
Just tonight my wife was complaining that I was thinking locally and acting locally (instead of thinking globally and acting locally) by chewing out the chairman of the homeowners association. Loudly. If I’d been worried about Americans being killed on a daily basis in Iraq, I might have treated him more politely.
TV used to be TV – now a primary use in our household is as an audio channel. Musak for moderns, if you will. Or should that be “Musak for modems”?
If you asked me whether TV ads and pay-per-click / spam were more nefarious, it’s not even a comparison. TV ads are immediately recognized and dealt with. Spam costs me $$ every day. Don’t even get me started on the phony pay-per-click advertising – it lacks the integrity of infomercials.
My BF got into an argument with the cable company and therefore, we have no cable. Unfortunately, we live in an area where regular TV receiption is hinky. It also doesn’t work with the new TV equipment we bought when BF purchased a 50inch plasma screen.
50inch plasma screen and no BBCAmerica. It SUCKS. I miss TV sometimes. But the movies we watch (all widescreen, dontcha know) make up for the TV. And I watched too much of it anyway. I have a TV downstairs for PS2, my DVD player and VCR, but I’ve noticed I’ve even backed off on those now.
I think we’ve just found other things to do. Although I wonder where the heck all my time to read has gone to. One would imagine I would have MORE time. T’ain’t so. There’s a mystery of the universe there somewhere.
There are few things I miss, and I would’ve liked to watch the Oscars, and other things on HBO and Showtime, but I figure everything makes it to DVD these days anyway.
It would probably have been a good idea for me to have gotten rid of my TV when I started university, but I lacked the willpower.
Anyway, I have no cable or payTV, and free-to-air TV in Australia is so bad that I just use my TV set to watch DVDs now.
I don’t watch much TV, spending most of my time online in the last few years. I’m beginning to watch more, partly because I enjoy the commercials. I also get most of my news online. As a result I find that I’m behind in popular culture. For instance I’ll see a thread about a movie or show in CS and I won’t have a clue what’s being talked about. Same goes with friends, I have no idea what they’re talking about when it comes to movies.
It’s confusing when people mention remade movies like The Amityville Horror (I think that’s how it’s spelt). I assume they’re talking about the original movie and wonder what made the movie such a popular comeback. It does make trips to the video store interesting.
At times it’s like I’m living in a bubble seperated from the outside world. And I do leave the house from time to time. Had to find out what this “Outside” thing was all about.