Out There: People Who Live Without TV:
(Just realized: I got this from Dan Lyke.)
"I interviewed one guy who was 31, single, an artist living in Boston, who saw himself as countercultural," Krcmar told LiveScience. "The next day I had an interview with a religious woman with ten children who lived in the Midwest. These people seem like they would disagree about almost everything, but if you ask them about television the things that came out of their mouths were almost identical."Oh how I wish I didn't have one (sometimes).
[...]
"It's sort of counter-intuitive, because people think their kids would drive them nuts without TV," Krcmar said. "But parents found that kids became very good at entertaining themselves and didn't need to be entertained all the time by something that was lively and active. They didn’t complain about being bored.
(Just realized: I got this from Dan Lyke.)
(Anonymous)
Here to grant your wish!
Ok, I'll do it anyway: you make yourself sound like a slave to your television! You can get rid of it any second! You especially would have to admit that you keep it around for entertainment as any useful information you might glean from it you could obtain from the internet (another trap, IMHO). So maybe I'm arguing that if you want to and can, you should?
Have you read Neil Postman's book Amusing Ourselves to Death? I'm already pretty anti-television but this book took me a step further, especially regarding my [responsibility to my] children.
From my computer-imposed cage, I can still see a better life out there -- glimpsing a ray of sunlight through a chink, as it were -- and it mostly involves nature. I see my life as a television owner as a much smaller cage.
And, to end on a positive note, since my children have no television viewing time and very little movie- they would be glued to the screen if I were to, for example, put on a DVD of a man standing in front of a chalkboard talking about math problems. A mixed blessing but I hope to use it to my advantage -- if no better way is apparent.
amazing how children can manage
But then this is a personal experience as well, so we know this in our family.
Disconnect it, then ask yourself why?
Actually, that's an exaggeration. We have a television. It's hooked up to a DVD player, and we watch a movie every two or three weeks. Maybe.
Now we don't have kids, and those kids aren't coming home with peer pressure to have seen the latest show that everyone else is talking about, and we just get the summaries when other people talk about what shows they're watching, but...
A suggestion, if you really want to get rid of it, is to do this: Find an excuse to move the TV somewhere. Maybe you need a little more space for a party, maybe you're going to be juggling in the living room and don't want to break anything, whatever, the point is that you disconnect the antenna.
Then, every time you want to hook it back up, ask yourself why you're doing that rather than any of the myriad other activities that are possible. Books, crafts, hanging out, whatever.
If you decide that what you really want to be doing at that point is watching TV, go ahead and hook it back up and angst about it no more. Certainly in this culture nobody's going to think less of you for having a TV.
However, that's what we did, and for at least half a decade now I haven't come up with a compelling reason why I should hook the TV back to an antenna. I've bought a TV series or two on DVD (Yay, "Firefly"!), I've seen a few episodes on the internet, but when I make myself ask that question I realize that even if I've got no energy and just want to vege out there are better ways to do that than just "seeing what's on".
Semi-relatedly, a few years ago Charlene asked me to stop drinking alcohol for a month or two to see if some aspects of my physiology changed. I still, occasionally, have a drink, but now I ask that conscious decision rather than "my friends are having a beer, I'll have one too." Yeah, it takes a little more effort to interact with the bar staff now, and I can't blind taste scotch any more, but I get a lot more useful evenings where I get more stuff I want to do done.
I think those two experiences are related.
Re: Disconnect it, then ask yourself why?
(Late attribution is because I had the tab open for a while and didn't realize where it came from. Since you've always been kind enough to attribute me, I try to return the favor.)
Great insights. dvfmama already moved the TV out of the way. We do watch TV, but it is a little less. Most of our watching is of DVDs from the library now.
And, if we don't get around to buying a new TV or a digital tuner, we'll really have to give up broadcast TV in a few months anyway.