Is there life after TV?
Comparison/contrast
Just about everyone in the United States owns and watches television. Consequently, we’ve become accustomed to a fairly predictable and monotonous home life. Every working day, we come home, pick up the mail, switch on the TV. Every night, we cook dinner, clean up the kitchen, watch some TV. Every weekend, we do the shopping, finish the chores, and settle in to watch a movie. And why not? It’s relaxing to hunker down on the sofa at the end of a tiring day and it doesn’t take any energy to flip through the channels with the remote control in one hand and a bowl of buttered popcorn in the other.
In my family, we grew up with the TV on. Every weekend, we watched Gunsmoke and Bonanza together as a family. Every year, we made special treats for the Wizard of Oz. I wouldn’t have developed my love for cooking if I hadn’t watched Graham Kerr as the Galloping Gourmet every day after school. I was hooked on Drawing With John Nagy and years later graduated from Kendall College of Art and Design.
Television isn’t all bad. It placates us and creates a comfortable background while we take care of business at home and when we’re tired it lulls us to sleep. TV is a companion for the elderly and a convenient babysitter for the young. It makes burglars think we’re home when we’re not. It entertains us cheaply with live action sports, incomparable performing arts and singular events of the world all in living color. It educates us about everything from the cells in our body to the galaxies in the universe. Besides, what would life be like without TV? Could we stand the silence? How would we relax? What would we do with so much time on our hands?
Let’s take a look at how the average American family might react in a sudden shift to life without TV. Mr. and Mrs. Jones decide to unplug the TV and put it in the garage starting Monday night. They want the family to spend more quality time together. No one takes Mom and Dad seriously and the family jokes about it all weekend. There’s a little tension in the air Monday night. Nobody is brave enough to turn on the TV. After dinner, Dad disconnects the VCR, takes the TV from the cabinet and carries it out to the garage. The little kids start crying. The older kids stomp off and slam their bedroom doors with their mouths hanging open. Grandma just stares off into space and doesn’t say a word. She has a spare TV in her room. Dad goes in her room and takes her TV out to the garage, too. Stony silence remains the rest of the evening.
Tuesday night. Still no one says a word. No one wants to bring up the topic of the TV in the garage. And no one is having a good time. The older kids are cranky. The little ones get into a fight. The eldest one tries to talk Dad into bringing the TV back into the house and ends up storming off to his room where he cranks up his stereo. Grandma continues to stare off into space. Clearly, this isn’t working.
Wednesday night. The older kids start to whine about being bored. The little kids continue to fight over their toys. Grandma has passed out in her chair. Will Mom and Dad ever stop this insanity and come to their senses? Nope. They’re sitting pat. Dad reads, does his crosswords, writes at his desk or works on the computer. Mom sews, writes letters, talks on the phone or uses the computer when Dad isn’t using it. They have something to do.
More time passes and the older kids start staying over at their friends’ homes more and more often. One of Grandma’s friends stops by and slips her a bottle of Christian Brothers Brandy. The little kids don’t seem to miss the TV much, but most of their toys are broken. The months pass and instead of finding things to share and do together, the family members drift apart from each other.
I just described a fabricated example, but it may not be too far from
the surveyed truth. The February 2002 edition of the Scientific American
has an interesting article about television viewing. In one experiment,
families were paid to stop watching TV for either a week or a month.
Many could not complete the period of abstinence and some families fought,
verbally and physically. There isn’t much to say, on the other hand[,]
about families who don’t ever watch TV, if such families even exist.
Perhaps this was the case in a small mountain community in British Columbia
that didn’t have television over 25 years ago. After the cables were
installed and people purchased and started to watch their new TVs, both
the adults and the children
became less creative in problem solving, less able to persevere at
tasks, and less tolerant of unstructured time.
Nearly 40 years ago families had only one TV. Gary A. Stein of the University of Chicago gathered the following comments. Listen to what people had to say when their set was broken: “The family walked around like a chicken without a head.” “Screamed constantly. Children bothered me and my nerves were on edge. Tried to interest them in games, but impossible. TV is part of them.” “It was terrible. We did nothing-my husband and I talked.”
It’s just too hard to adjust to life without TV by going cold turkey. Perhaps it’s not even practical to live without television unless our perspectives change drastically as we get older. I don’t think that TV damages us so much as it robs us of time that could be spent doing other things such learning new skills, getting some exercise or doing volunteer work for the worthy cause of our choice.
Maybe I was lucky to have a family that watched TV together. Today there seems to be a TV in every room of the house and there’s no need to agree on a program to watch. To watch TV or not watch TV is more of a question for adults than for kids, and even though we all say we want to cut down the time we spend in front of the tube, we never really do. The darn thing has us hypnotized!