I don’t have a TV, but that doesn’t mean I don’t watch it. Having trained myself out of treating television broadcasts as audiovisual wallpaper, whenever I visit friends or relatives and there’s a TV on in the background I have to make a huge effort not to be hypnotized by it. The main reason I have to keep telling people that I don’t have a TV is that people keep beginning conversations with “Did you see…?”
So I enjoyed reading this at Maximum Bob. Not owning a television does not make you a better person. Pretending not to watch it makes you look silly.
I tend not to watch TV – as in a television set – because we only have five channels (for a very good reason; if we had more, we’d watch more). When I’m at my parents’ in the US, or at a hotel in the US, I find it hard to switch the thing off if I turn it on. Now I’m even flying JetBlue so I can watch 36 channels of live TV. If my dream comes true and I am able to download my favourite US shows easily and cheaply, I will never have another productive moment in my life.
I’m not guilty. There’s some good telly out there if you have the patience to flick through the dross. The only thing I’ve had to quit recently for health reasons was 24 hour news channels. Talk about hypnotic. I sometimes found myself still staring at CNN through the fourth repeat cycle of the days news. (‘Just one more update. That’s all. One more. I’ll stop after that…’)
Thanks for the mention, and the Pootergeek halo effect.
You’re welcome.
(You’ll have to explain the exact nature of “the Pootergeek halo effect” though.)
Oh yes, I can relate to that. It sounds ridiculous, but, not having a TV, watching (for example) sadistic Russian game shows (and my goodness are Russian TV game shows sadistic) on Latvian TV easily becomes a rare holiday treat, thanks to TV in hotels, and so on.
And after a while people start to interject “…oh, but you don’t have a TV”, just after they’ve asked “Did you watch….”
(and my goodness are Russian TV game shows sadistic)
Not half as sadistic as their reality TV shows. Russian TV is appalling, really it is.
Anyway, I grew up without a TV at home. My mother hated them for some inexplicable reason, so when other kids at school were going on about the A-Team and He-Man, I had no idea what they were on about. I was able to dismantle pretty much anything though, and I had read an impressive number of books.