week of 4/17/02
 
 
 

Unplugged — One week without the television
By Jeff Minick

“April is the cruelest month, breeding lilacs out of the dead land.”

So wrote the poet T. S. Eliot, and this was before the IRS and tax filings.

In addition to lilacs and long lines at the post office on the Ides of April, the fourth month of the year has recently garnered yet another laurel for cruelty by serving as the time when the nonprofit TV-Turnoff Network offers us its annual “T.V. Turnoff Week.”

Both inveterate couch potatoes and casual television viewers may feel tempted to blow off T.V. Turnoff Week as one more earnest, sweaty attempt by America’s mother hens to improve the state of the republic’s soul by trampling on its fun. Yet some of the statistics regarding television might cause even hardcore denizens of boobtubia to consider shutting down the set. Did you know, for example, that:

• Forty percent of Americans frequently watch television while eating dinner

• Children watch an average of three hours of television per day

• Adults watch an average of four hours of television per day

• The average American will watch nine years of television by the age of 65.

Scientists have recently joined statisticians in cautioning Americans that they watch too much television. In December 2001, the surgeon general issued a report that cited television as a major factor in the increase of obesity in children (I might add that the government may have a skewed definition of obesity; a recent government scale recently placed me within a step or two of obesity, and all this time I thought I was just pleasingly plump.). In this report the surgeon general warned about television’s adverse sedentary effect as well as its many commercials for high-salt, high-fat, high-caloric foods.

Scientific American then devoted a considerable portion of its February 2002 issue to the idea that television watching may demonstrate a classical pattern of addiction. Social scientists Robert Kubey and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi discovered that television triggers an orienting response in human beings — that we are, in other words, drawn to the screen by the stimulation that it arouses within us. (Question: if I was in a room with the young Sophia Loren, the love of my life at age 15, and with a television set showing Sorphia Loren in a movie, would I be at all distracted from the real Sophia by the movie? My answer: probably yes. Yikes!)

These two researchers also discovered that television helped people feel relaxed, that watching it reduced mental stimulation, that after watching television for relatively long stretches of time many people reported that “television has somehow absorbed or sucked out their energy, leaving them depleted.” Many who feel superior to those with drug or alcohol problems have no qualms about plopping down in front of a television set because “it helps me relax.”

Finally, they found that quitting television cold turkey often brought out signs of aggression, anxiety and irritation in viewers, signals similar to those of a person who has given up alcohol, caffeine, cigarettes and drugs. “Many could not complete the period of abstinence,” Kubey and Csikszentmihalyi wrote in Scientific American. “Some fought, verbally and physically.”

Even without these figures, most of us realize that television has a deleterious effect on the human mind and soul. No teacher has yet told students to watch lots of television every night. Parents may brag about how many books their child has read, but no parents brag about how much television their child has watched. Administrators of quality day care centers usually reassure parents that television viewing time for the younger set is either limited or not permitted.

Nor do we need experts to tell us that what we are viewing on our television sets is unhealthy for us. Though the networks have curbed some violence in recent years, the tube still presents a heavy dose of car crashes, fights and murders. Even worse, the electronic professor gives nightly lessons in crassness and verbal cruelty in shows ranging from “Friends” to “The Simpsons” to “The Drew Carey Show.”

Television, not parents or teachers, is the great sex educator of our time, teaching our young people little about the beauty of human love but lecturing instead like a leering juvenile miscreant with a store of smutty jokes. Finally, television teaches us to value image over substance, causing us to mistake sincerity for truth and physical endowments for real beauty. The media that frequently stakes a claim to rectitude and truth has the mouth of a slattern and the morals of an executive producer.

So what’s the cure? Go cold turkey.

Participate in TV-Turnoff Week (April 22-28). Turn off your set. Pull the plug. Put it in a back closet.

Turning off the television, even for a week, frightens some people. “Give up television? What would I say to my wife?” an older gentleman once asked me. Parents have nightmares of screaming children and whining adolescents if they unplug the set. Many men and a few women fear that they would suffer cold sweats and shaking without their televised sports. Some women and a few men foresee long empty days if they can’t view Rosie and Oprah.

In our own house we don’t watch a lot of junk television — we don’t have cable for one thing, but we do watch a lot of television: videos, sports events, children’s shows and cartoons for the youngest of our prospective couch potatoes. Once, years ago, we took away the television, and it stayed away for months. Yet somehow the babbling beast crept back out of the closet to steal away our evenings.

It’s time, I think, to turn off the set again, to go cold turkey.

Just cutting back on television won’t do, anymore than smokers can cut back on cigarettes rather than kicking the habit. Soon we’d go from watching the last quarter of the basketball game to that rerun of “Seinfeld” that we’ve seen three times to the cartoons that seem, when compared to the cartoons of the 1940s, to have been devised and drawn by morons.

So we’re taking the set out of circulation for a while. We’ll keep in mind that wisest of all sayings regarding change — “One day at a time” — and we’ll look for other things to do. Maybe we’ll try some of the suggestions of the TV-Turnoff folks — reading more, board games, that sort of thing. Maybe we’ll come up with our own activities — more time at the gym, swimming, finally figuring out how to attach the scanner to the computer.

If you decide to join us, let me know how it goes.

(Jeff Minick lives in Waynesville and can be reached at Saintsbookco@aol.com)