You'll watch until you don't. :)
No stoning necessary... enjoy your life!

yeah, no stones coming from here,
your honesty is appreciated
:)

I figure I have a love/hate relationship with television. It's an incredibly powerful medium; it has the ability to communicate information, emotion, and understanding. It can be entertaining, educational, and interesting. It can be an amazing storyteller, it can combine words and pictures and music and transcend time and space. Television is an astonishingly powerful tool.

Unfortunately, it also grabs my attention at times when I don't want it to. It is the ultimate diversion, jumping in to fill any empty space. If it is on in a room, I struggle mightily to resist it and often lose that battle; I find myself watching, listening, and responding even though i don't want to.

Worse, the reality is, modern commercial television programming tends to pander to a lowest common denominator mindset in order to suck in as many "eyeballs" as they can, since the ad revenue is tied directly to ratings. They sell sex, innuendo, titillation and violence in order to do so. Education is at best terciary, at worst abandoned altogether; the power of the medium is reduced to gossip and voyeurism and shock value.

Are there still good shows on? Sure, there are. And I'm not opposed to occasionally sitting down, watching one, and then switching it off. But I object strenuously to the ubiquitous "always on" presence of TV, the filler/background noise use of tv, the use of tv as an electronic babysitter, the wasted hours of insipid channel-surfing looking for god-knows-what as long as it jumps off the screen and makes me forget my life kind of a feeling -- you know, the one that leaves you wondering where the day went, and with a sick empty pasty feeling in the gut and the heart. THAT I can do without.

Finally, I personally find television to be so compelling that I fall into some of the described behaviors without really wanting to, and therefore I resent it and generally choose to be free of it in my environment. If I must have one, it should be covered or something when it isn't in use, so that it isn't staring balefully back, saying "go ahead, turn me on." It's too easy. I hate that about television as we know it in this time and country; I hate the homogenizing effect it has on culture, the "did you watch xyz last night" conversations it imposes on real life, the celebrity gossip it spawns, the McAction McNews it fosters upon the craft of journalism, on and on.

In short, I hate more than I love about it, when it comes down to real life.

Excellent rundown of the pros and cons, David. I agree wholeheartedly. For me it is precisely because I love TV so much that I despise it so intensely. I don't just want to not have a TV, I secretly plot to rid the entire planet of TVs. Yes, I'm the one!

Really I do find the misuse of the incredible power TV presents to be what actually makes it a destructive influence in society. Every society it goes into it seems to corrupt. Recall the studies on violence done in Bhutan in response to which the government started looking into banning TV. I don't know how it all ended, but I hope they succeeded, or at least restricted its use in Bhutan to educational programming only. And by educational I don't mean teaching people how to get hired by Donald Trump or outlast 30 other peoople if stranded on an otherwise uninhabited island.

If I could have a TV and just watch the truly enriching programming and not watch at all if nothing of that sort was on, I would have one. But I don't have the discipline to do that, and in my society there is a lot of crap on all the time, especially on the free broadcast channels, so I have to do without the box entirely or succumb to it completely.

If you can walk the line without falling into the abyss, more power to you. I don't actually want to rid the world of all TVs. I do however want more people to become responsibly aware of how it is affecting them and make conscious choices about how it is most productive for them to relate to the device. I want full disclosure, honesty, and responsibility. Sounds like you are all about those same things. Stay true, TV or no TV.