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Television

by Marina Michaels

I haven't had television service since 1996, and I haven't missed it. In my life, I have lived many more years without television service than with it; when I quit in 1996, we had had television service for about four years. So perhaps it was easier for me to quit than, say, someone who grew up with television as the background soundtrack to their lives. Still, I think we would all be better off without television at all, at least without television programming as it is today. Television watching—any television watching, no matter how educational—injures toddlers' cognitive abilities. It also destroys initiative, inures us to rudeness and violence (even encourages many to be more violent), and wastes our time, time in which we could all be being much more productive either in the material or spiritual sense.

The Many Problems With Television

The content of television is neither merely banal nor merely commercial. This would not matter. Instead it is subliminally didactic, unendingly instructive. It has agendas unrelated to soap. Remember that the advertising and television industries are tightly entwined. Those commercials, seemingly almost invertebrate in their tiresomeness, in fact are the product of decades of manipulative experience by highly intelligent people who have studied the psychology of the audience. —Pondering The Telescreen: A Tale Of Two Cities, by Fred Reed

Television is not only a vast intellectual wasteland, but is an active danger to our moral, ethical, and spiritual growth. Take for example shows that glorify or romanticize serial killers, sociopaths, and psychopaths (Heroes and Dexter come to mind). In making it seem that there are a rather alarmingly large proportion of those in the world, such shows promote fear. In glamorizing psychotic, murderous behavior, or justifying it by presenting the message that it is okay to go out and slay as long as you are slaying the right person, these shows dull people's sense of right and wrong, and make it easier for people to tolerate behaviors that they should instead find appalling and abhorrent.

Allow me to illustrate the idea of how graphic images can dull one's senses. In 1973, a movie was released named The Day of the Jackal (based on a book of the same title; it was later remade and released in 1997 as The Jackal). The story is of a professional assassin hired to kill Charles de Gaulle, leader of France in the 1960s. (As an aside, the novel was used by several real-life assassins as a kind of “how-to” book, which is another reason why people should be careful what they write.) One of the scenes in the 1973 movie was of the assassin practicing his snipering abilities by using a watermelon as a target. In the early 1970s, there was an outcry over the scene of the watermelon exploding as the bullet hit, because that scene was considered horrifically graphic and very violent. Nowadays, after decades of being exposed to increasingly graphic and realistic splatter scenes, most people have become so inured that they just laugh at the 1970s sensibilities when I tell them this story.

But think about it. Do we want to become insensitive to violence? Do we want to get used to seeing our fellow human beings violently injured, dismembered, and slain? Do we want to get so addicted to those images that we demand even more graphic scenes? I have met people who love horror shows and films. They say they want to see more and more violence onscreen because the older images no longer “raise the hairs” on their arms or “get the adrenaline rushing.” I just don't know what to say to that kind of numbness. I have to hide my eyes at what many people consider not even mildly disturbing, and I feel ill sometimes when unexpectedly exposed to some scenes in some movies. (Which is why I am very careful about what I see, and I try to find out what a movie is about before I watch it. But this essay is about television, not movies. Though things are being shown on television now that not many years ago were not even allowed in films.)

In addition to this very serious issue, there are many other bad things that television is.

• In addition to numbing us to scenes we shouldn't be numb to, television also is quite bad for very young children, and stunts all kinds of other sensibilities and abilities. In 1996, when I chose to completely withdraw from television (I had had television service for perhaps four years at that point), my daughter, who had been allowed only a restricted diet of television watching, showed an amazingly steep climb in her reading abilities in just a very short amount of time.
• In television shows, people behave toward each other in ways that people didn't used to tolerate, and yet, because we are exposed to that behavior on television over and over again, some people have started to think it is normal. Worse yet, some people are imitating it.
• Television is a time waster. How many times have you sat down just to watch “one show,” only to find yourself still sitting there many shows and hours later? That happens to a lot of people. Also, the number of commercials you watch per hour has been steadily creeping up. Most one-hour shows now have 17 minutes or more of commercials. That means that at a minimum, for every two minutes of show, you are watching almost one minute of commercial.
• Television is expensive. Television service in my state is generally US$100 and up per month. That's US$1,200 a year. In addition, studies show that the more hours you spend watching television, the more money you spend: “for every hour of television a person watches per week, the average American spends [an additional] $200” per year (over what they would have spent otherwise). You can do the math: Two hours a night equals 14 hours a week, which results in $2800 a year in extra spending. There are a lot of more useful things you could do with that money.
• Television is not interactive in any sense of the word, and therefore encourages passivity. Many health experts feel that turning off the television would help us all get into better shape, because we are more likely to be more active. Note that, despite popular culture, you can be in shape and still be large. Television also discourages social interaction. How many people fall silent and become glued to the set when the television is turned on?

What to do Instead of Watching Television

I am not sure anyone has ever said they regretted not spending more time with their families or on spiritual activities, for example, but a lot of people in retrospect have regretted spending too much time watching TV. There are a ton of things you can do instead of watching television. You can

• Read more books, magazines, and Internet articles. If you have children, you can read to your children, or read with them.
• Consider subscribing to new magazines, such as the Smithsonian (one of my favorites). Some great children's magazines, high-quality and free of advertisements, such as Ladybug and Cricket, are published by Carus. Even if you only read a few articles a week or even a month, you will find that you are learning new and interesting things, and you will have more to talk about with your friends, family, and co-workers than just what some fictional character on television did.
• Ask your children what kinds of things they would like to do that you have said you can't afford. Then take the money you are saving from not watching television and get them those riding lessons. Or swimming lessons. Or swing lessons. Or send them to Space Camp (it is surprisingly affordable). Or whatever. Check out your local parks and recreation for fun classes—maybe there is something you can all do together? Visit a nearby national park. Go river rafting or camping together. Visit museums and talk about the exhibits. Think of how these kinds of experiences are going to stay with them the rest of their lives, unlike any television show, which is likely to be forgotten by next year.
• Pick up a new hobby or learn a new craft, or spend more time on an existing hobby or craft. If you have children, sharing a craft with them can be a lot of fun. After divesting ourselves of the television, I taught my daughter how to embroider (counted cross-stitch). When she was 11, we entered her first project in the local county fair, and she not only won first prize for her age group, one of the judges wrote a note to her saying that her work was so good that she could have entered it in the adult division. We also spent a lot of time painting porcelain figures, making jewelry, and doing other crafts. I also continued to read a lot to her, as I always had, until she started reading faster to herself than I could read aloud, at which point she started reading a lot of books to herself.
• Play board and card games.
• During daylight hours, spend time outdoors, either in your garden, if you have one, or going to local parks or other attractions. Become a tourist in your own town! Never visited the Statue of Liberty? Do it! Have some local hum-drum museum that occupies three musty-smelling rooms in some building? Visit it, even if you end up laughing at how cheesy it is.
• Spend more time on spiritual activities.
• Become more physically active; use some of the time you would normally spend watching television to take up yoga, weight-lifting, jogging, walking, swimming, exercise classes, or whatever other activity appeals to you.
• Take a class at your local junior college. Junior colleges are very easy to use. They offer community classes, which generally meet just once or a few times, and regular classes, and you pretty much can get in no matter what your educational background is. Courses range all over the map, including culinary, travel, writing, language, computers, sewing, arts (drawing, painting), and so on. I've been taking Japanese classes at my local junior college the past several years, and, while I am slow, I have definitely learned something, and feel great about it. I have also started to take other classes, such as Photoshop and CSS, and am really enjoying myself. Most of the computer-related classes are offered online, which helps with my schedule tremendously.
• Become a tourist in your own town. What local attractions have you never gotten around to seeing because you didn't have time? Go see them. Take the kids. If you don't have any of your own, take nieces, nephews, cousins, or the kids of friends or neighbors. It is a lot of fun to see a child discovering and enjoying new things.
• Here are some more ideas. This page also says that children watch 40,000 commercials a year. Think about that staggering number. Let's say those commercials are only 30 seconds long. That's still 20,000 minutes of commercials alone, or 333 hours of watching. Think how much a child could do in that amount of time. Now remember that we are just talking about the number of commercials children watch, and I am being conservative in my estimates. Think about how children watch an average of 4 hours of television a day, and think of how much better their minds, grades, and bodies would be, not to mention how much healthier they would be emotionally, if, instead of spending four hours in front of the boob tube, they spent time reading, doing homework, participating in a sport, or talking with friends or family (over dinner, while playing a game, etc.).

An Aside on Board Games

When I was a child, we seldom had access to television. The few times we owned a television, we were restricted to watching two shows a week. By the time we had a television for longer than a few months, we were too old to be interested in it. So what did we do instead? When we weren't outside playing (which was much of the time), or when I wasn't reading (also a large amount of the time), my brothers and I played a lot of board games. Some of them I enjoyed, others not so much.

Even into my teens, my love of board games continued: At the age of 15, I would sneak out of my bedroom window at night to meet my boyfriend and—go over to his best friend's house to play Jeopardy with his best friend's Mom (hello, Patrick and Mrs. Centolanzi, wherever you are) and some other friends.

Yes, that's what I said. I'd sneak out the window, not to go do wild things with my boyfriend, but to play board games. I admit it. I was a nerd, with a large helping of geek thrown in. Probably still am in many ways. At other times, when I was visiting my boyfriend at his home, his Mom, Mrs. Paxton, used to come quietly by his bedroom, perhaps fully expecting us to be in a clinch because we were so quiet, only to find us sitting separately on his bed, each of us reading something. Usually either Scientific American or Science News or some similar magazine, or science fiction or fantasy. (I read Tolkien's Lord of the Rings fourteen times in high school, I loved it that much.) I still remember her shaking her head and saying, "Those durn kids," as she moved on, but I can now also imagine the relief she must have felt at our unordinary behavior. I don't know if she knew about the late-night sessions with Mrs. Centolanzi, but if she did, I am sure she also preferred that her son, her son's girlfriend, and her son's friends were all safely at a reliable adult's house, chowing down on the best cioppino in town and playing board games, than have us be somewhere else, less suitable, less savory, and less wholesome.

Board games were and still remain a fun, cheap, and easy way to pass the time. A lot of time, in some cases (marathon stints of Monopoly or Risk come to mind), but not necessarily, and even in the case of a game that won't end, it is always easy enough to pack up the game and go do something else. Unlike television, there isn't anything lethargically hypnotic to board games. And if you are really low on funds, you can visit your local thrift store and buy any number of games.

One of my favorite games from the 1970s was a game called Facts in Five. Five players would each draw a card with categories and classes (topics) on them, and would also each draw a letters, and then would have five minutes to fill in a five-by-five grid in which the columns needed to be filled in with words matching the topics but starting with each of the five letters. (An asterisk was “any letter.”) You couldn't use the same answer in two different places. A simplified illustration is probably clearest here.

There can be a certain amount of bluffing in this game. Unfortunately, if someone thinks you are bluffing, they can challenge you, and if you can't defend yourself, you lose that square. Most of the time I can meet the challenges, but for one session, I just could not convince people that there really had been a man by the name of Bishop Usher, and no one was willing to let me show them on a computer, because they said if I found it on the Internet, there was no way of knowing that it wasn't still made up. Hmph. Though I guess that the fact that I was beating the pants off of them might have had something to do with their recalcitrance.

Anyway. This game as it was is no longer available, though I still have mine, and of course there is always eBay. An updated and pop-culturized version is now available, apparently, and there are also games that are essentially much easier versions of this one available.

What to do If You Just Can't Quit

Television is an addiction that is very hard to quit. People find all kinds of excuses for it, saying that well, there are some good programs on (I hear the phrase “Discovery channel” a lot), but when it boils right down to it, they are addicted to it and that is that. They also use it as a way to keep their children occupied (instead of spending quality time with them), and they don't want to give up that convenience. If you are one of these people, here are some things you can do to diminish the effects of television.

• Talk with your children and present the case of not watching television to them. See what they think. Ask for their input. If they aren't used to you talking with them like that, think about what that says about the nature of your relationship with them, and vow to be a better parent from now on. Check out Talk With Your Kids.
• Always preview any program you are considering letting your child or children watch. Consider things that are important to you. If you don't want violence or strong language, examine shows for those things. If you want positive self-images promoted, consider what messages are being presented. For example, I didn't allow my daughter to watch Power Rangers because that show's subliminal message was that people could not triumph over evil unless they became faceless robots, and even then, they had to lose their individual robot selves and merge into one faceless big robot if they truly wanted to triumph. When you have made a decision, tell your children why you are or are not letting them watch a show. Also, take the time to watch shows with them, and talk with them afterward to see how it affected them.
• Educate yourself about how strongly all media images—not just television, but movies and print media as well—affect children. Consider race as well as clothing and other aspects of appearance. Studies have shown that both boys and girls experience lowered self-esteem after going through even just one magazine; imagine how the constant display on television of people who are all unnaturally thin is going to affect them. (Even adults experience lessened self-esteem, no matter what they look like.) And because of the media, many children have the hugely mistaken idea that being brown is bad. Also, body image issues often lead to eating disorders and sometimes teen suicides. Visit the National Eating Disorders Association Web site for more on body image.
• Take a look at the list of alternative things to do instead of watching television, and consider doing some of them anyway.
• Reduce your watching time. What shows do you really, truly enjoy? Watch only those. Set a noisy, annoying, and persistent timer well out of arm's reach that will alert you when that show is over, to give you a reason to stand up and turn the television off. Better yet, tape the show and watch it later so you can fast-forward through the commercials. Or, if the show is available on DVD, consider waiting and renting it later, through Netflix, for example. By delaying, you may find that you don't want to watch it at all, after all, and even if you do watch it, you avoid wasting time on commercials. Give yourself a day off from television. Then two days. Then three. See how many days you can go without it. Make it a friendly family competition with some big rewards for everyone.

Some Religions Weigh in on Television

While checking the Internet, I found the following interesting pages on television from different religions perspectives (listed in alphabetical order). I find it interesting that each person pretty much says the same things about it, regardless of their religion. Note that I don't necessarily agree with everything said on any site I provide links to, but I feel it is worthwhile to show that there are some things people from all walks of life and many different types of beliefs can agree on.

• Christianity: Catholic and Protestant (this latter is a quick list and an excellent summary)
• Islam
• Judaism
• Zen Buddhism

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