The household I live in is one of the estimated 2% or 1 in 50 households without a television. I have 3 children. I'm not giving my children the same luxury I enjoyed of wasting away a large part of my childhood in front of the tube. We have been without a television for about 6 years.

My wife and I did not have a sudden epiphany and decide to toss our TV. The television was beginning to be a drag, same old habits, same old shows, and same old orienting our evenings around the nightly line up of lowest common denominator entertainment. Then gradually, our aging TV's sound started to break up and eventually it completely went away. The kids would still go downstairs, turn it on and watch their favorite shows and tapes while lip reading or playing the audio portion from memory. We took it to be repaired and discovered it would cost more to fix than the value of the TV. Somewhere right around this time while the TV was in the shop for a couple of weeks, we got through our withdrawal period. We had been gradually weaned as the sound quality gradually waned. And by the time we decided not to get it fixed and not to get it replaced, we didn't miss it. We brought it home from the shop and a week later we put it out on the curb with the rest of the trash for the garbage truck to haul away.

Television has changed somewhat from when I was a kid watching I Love Lucy reruns. The commercials tended to be little vignettes. Mostly dumb little stories. I remember the Ronco Mr. Microphone commercial where the self inflated dope in the convertible stops and while leering into the camera says into Mr. Microphone "Hey good lookin, I'll be back for you later". Not exactly high art. These days the commercials seem more carefully crafted. The ads present a series of flashing pictures and create a constant rolling barrage of cuts just marginally within a person's perceptual capacity to process. If I had to label it with a word, the word would be "Intense". In 1997, at 6:50 in the evening, 685 Japanese people, mostly children, simultaneously suffered epileptic seizures. It was a Pokemon show with lots of fighting action made with quick cuts requiring high concentration and a close proximity to the screen so nothing would be missed. The quickly moving, high-contrast patterns triggered a mass occurance of photosensitive epilepsy. When I was growing up, Johnny Quest with his dog Bandit was the height of action cartoons.

In my day-to-day life, I rarely deal with faked emotions. Other than some occasional posturing by people, I deal in the genuine external reflection of people's thoughts and emotions. I still enjoy going to a play or movie, but these use up a few hours each month rather than a few hours each day. When I travel on business and stay in a hotel by myself, I get the chance to indulge in a little television watching. I Catch up and see what the other 98% of the US does in their spare time. I am struck by the wide range of truly faked emotions. Some are skillfully duplicated, others are a poor shadow of reality, but excluding news clips, they're all imitations. Sometimes I wonder if the emotions we express in our daily lives aren't patterned after television, rather than the other way around. Even the news clips are often sensationalized which (in my mind anyway) is a form of faking. The news agencies are drumming up excitement where it normally would not exist. Just to keep people glued to the current channel. During the course of a normal night of 4 hours of television watching, the viewer is exposed to instances of murders, affairs, red hot anger, profound grief, duplicity, giddy joy, even numinous infilling. Every speck of which is false emotion.

A couple of years ago, the show ER, experimented with live television and created something of a sensation. The excitement centered around catching the actors and producers in the act of production, exposing the underpinnings of prime time television. Have things gotten so dull in America we get our thrills from seeing the man behind the curtain pushing levers?

What good has all the thousands of hours I passively spent watching television as a child done me? Oh sure I can fit in with other baby boomers like me who burned all of those thousands of hours. I can fondly recall the various episodes of Gilligan's Island. Or if a coworker says "dag nabbit Luke..." I know he is making a play on The Real McCoys with Walter Brennan. In fact, the other day at the supermarket they were having a trivia contest and asking questions over the PA. I won an eight-pack of deli hot dogs for knowing the name of the maid on the Brady Bunch. Do you remember her name? Finally I can point to an instance where I actually got some tangible payoff for all those years planted in front of the tube. But was the ratio of hours spent to knowledge acquired a winning percentage? Is an 8 pack of hot dogs for knowing the name Alice and the ability to catch obscure 60's and 70's references worth having spent years of my waking life? What else might I have been doing with all those hours?

All those hours... The United States Census Bureau in 1997 published this stupefying fact: The average American spends 1,595 hours a year watching television. This works out to 4.4 hours of television per person per day. The normal 40 hour work week over the course of a year consumes 2,000 (8 * 5 * 50) hours of a person's life. The Census Bureau also said the average American spends 17 minutes a day reading books.

I can read 2 or 3 times faster than most people speak, so consequently the bandwidth of information I gain from a book hour-for-hour is much higher than I absorb from television. And I don't have 20% of my time taken with commercials when reading a book. If one of my children interrupts me while reading a book I don't snap at them because if I don't read it now, I'm going to have to wait till the repeats come on in the summer. I have the luxury to put my book down, talk to my child however long it may take and pick up the book when I'm finished. I notice my phone rings more on the hour and half hour. I think the timing comes from the callers finishing one show and not yet starting the next.

When I spend a night in a hotel watching TV for hours, my memory of what I watched seems to evapoate within an hour or so. Sometimes a commercial comes on and towards the end of the commercial break I get bored and ask myself should I channel surf away, or should I stay? Sometimes I can't even remember what I was watching 3 minutes ago because it all blurs together. My retention is much higher when I read a book possibly because I have to make an active movie in my head, rather than letting the external stimulus wash over me. I'm not suggesting reading is the only way to spend one's spare time. There are family activities, participating in sports instead of just watching them, the somewhat lost art of conversation, and all the things people filled their time with before the late 1950s.

If my decision to not own a television comes up in conversation, the most common response is: "good for you!" Then the person I'm talking to often get defensive, especially if they have children and say something like "we only watch videos", or "I only watch sports", or the good old standby of "Well there are lots of good educational shows". What I do notice is most everyone agrees television is a bad influence, especially on children and they talk about the various rules they have in their family concerning limiting children's access to the TV. In my mind I ask, "if it's such a bad influence, then why don't you ditch the stupid thing?" We don't need any rules concerning watching TV under our roof. I don't have to worry about my kids getting exposed to inappropriate material from this box I invited into my house and can't control. I also don't need to worry about my children being able to read at their grade level. It appears to be inconceivable to the average American to entertain the notion of not having a television.

A few weeks ago I went to visit a friend who was in the hospital for back surgery. It was Monday night and we watched the Denver Bronco game on Monday Night Football. Generally good wholesome family entertainment. During a break a commercial came on and it was Ellen plugging her show. Ellen said, "If you like to see people of the same sex patting each other on the butt, watch my show". Suddenly, the wholesome family thing seemed a little less wholesome. Another Monday night a few weeks later I went over to the same friend's house to watch another Denver Bronco game. During the game I got to witness Bill Romanowski spit in his opponent's face, an excellent role model if ever I saw one. The same game contained John Elway missing a critical pass and the close up shot of his reaction did not take a lip reading genius to translate the four letter word used in his exclamation. I'm neither a puritan, nor a wide eyed innocent who is unrealistic about how the world behaves, I just don't need this stuff for multiple hours on a daily basis as entertainment.

There are some good educational shows available. Unfortunately, your kids probably spend only a small fraction of their television hours actually watching these educational programs. Even the time spent watching those educational shows are often degraded by commercials or advertising for the network. Yes, there are some good educational shows, but there are a great many good books out there, too.

A few weeks ago I was sitting in church listening to a presentation on child rearing. The woman presenting said parents had to be careful of what their children watched on the tube so they would not be exposed to inappropriate influences or material. She went on and on about limiting and closely supervising the child's TV hours per day. Not once was there even the whiff of the idea of removing this item from your house altogether. My guess is it never occurred to her.

The Christian church says God is omniscient and omnipresent, meaning all powerful and everywhere. The church further says the devil although very capable, is neither omnipresent nor omniscient. He is portrayed as a highly efficient time slicing being with an army of minions. Now, if I were Satan and wanted to have an effective method of presenting my agenda without spreading myself too thin, what better vehicle than the television. I could spend my time influencing the networks and local stations and still have my material go into 98% of the households via the medium of television which the households happily embraced and spent more than a quarter of their waking time watching.

Do I miss television? Sometimes I do. I Actually would like to watch an occasional football game now and then. But I don't want this badly enough to invite the television back into my home.

The saying "A picture is worth a thousand words" does apply in here. There is a visual (albeit passive) stimulation to watching TV not provided by reading a book. Television shows me a picture of what they are talking about, in a book I have to make the active leap of imagination to picture the scene myself in my own mind.

Another thing my kids miss out on is a set of unifying cultural ties provided by television. The shows provide a common frame of reference, a reflection of our culture so everyone who gets exposed to it is on the same page. This common frame of reference encompasses sound bites like "Well excuuuuse me!", it also provides current fashion trends, music trends, and news trends. These days an unknown can become a celebrity overnight because of the mass media which is mostly television.

Indeed there are some good brain-engaging shows. The A&E network provides the biographies of famous people. They really are quite good except of course for the multiple plugs during the hour for other A&E shows. There are some great wildlife shows which show vanishing animals in their native habitat. Some of the science programming is informative. One night I watched a show featuring a surgeon doing a knee replacement. A fascinating show to watch, and I would be hard pressed to find it through any other easily accessible forum. The show ER has good quality control since there are several emergency room doctors who act as advisers. Watching it makes you feel a little smarter. But truthfully, the next day, how much of the content beyond the general plot do you remember?

Good commercials have gotten much better in the last few years. Well thought out and well executed. But, after the 12th, 20th, 50th time I see the same commercial, the bloom wears off and I am sick of it. The commercial becomes tedious to watch. If I watch a 30 second commercial 50 times, I am spending nearly a half hour doing something which not only wastes my time, but begins to feel quite a bit like torture. Anyone who watches TV knows what I'm talking about. The pain is a lot worse when the commercial is offensive, stupid, or just plain bad.

Taking all the good things television has to offer and weighing them against the bad, I would still say without a whisker of doubt we made the right decision. One summer my children spent a few weeks at their grandparent's house and were able to indulge themselves with the average American's ration of TV watching. By the end of their visit they were sick of television and we haven't heard a peep from them on wanting to get a tube at home. In fact they have commented many times (and I promise this is the truth) on how lucky they feel in not having a television. They recognized how easily they were sucked into it and the addictive nature of having it available.

Copyright 2003 - Don Harrington