Better than TV
One of the very few non-Christian, non-baseball blogs I follow is Seth Godin’s. He is a marketing expert who writes about productivity in the business world (and in all of life) and other related topics. He recently had a post titled But it’s better than TV that I really appreciated:
At the local health food store lunch buffet, they offer stir fried tempeh.
I never get it. Not because I don’t like it, but because there are always so many other things on the buffet that I prefer.
That’s why I don’t watch TV. At all. There are so many other things I’d rather do in that moment.
Broadcast TV was a great choice when a> there weren’t a lot of other options and b> when everyone else was watching the same thing, so you needed to see it to be educated.
Now, though, you could:
- Run a little store on eBay
- Write a daily blog
- Write a novel
- Start an online community about your favorite passion
- Go to meetups in your town
- Volunteer to tutor a kid, in person or online
- Learn a new language, verbal or programming
- Write hand written thank you notes each evening to people who helped you out or did a good job
- Produce small films and publish them online
- Listen to the one thousand most important operas
- Read a book or two every evening
- Play a game a Scrabble with your family
None of them are perfect. Each of them are better than TV.
And of course, as Catholics, we could add many more to this list:
- Go to Adoration
- Pray the Rosary
- Help in a soup kitchen
- Visit your neighbor
And the list could go on and on…
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Running a little store on eBay is better than TV? Possibly, if one is simply turning on the television and blindly watching whatever comes up. However, if one is carefully selecting (a la, one hopes, for those one or two books each evening), then I beg to differ. Same for writing a daily blog … I’ve seen plenty that offer terrible reading because they are composed with virtually no thought. One would then have been better off watching last week’s House, which ironically was a thoughtful look at connecting with those around us and focused on blogging.
I see a striking lack of qualification in those sorts of choices and that blanket “kill your tv” mentality.
Julie,
You of course are right that there are many ways to spend your time that are worse than TV.
However, it seems to me that the vast majority of people today waste a lot of time watching TV (the *average* time spent *each day* in front of the boob tube is four hours!), and there are limitless ways to spend our time better than that (even if the particular ones on the list given can also be wasteful). Killing your TV *never* hurt anyone spiritually, and watching it has harmed countless people.
But I agree that “killing your TV” is not a requirement for Catholics. However, as a general rule of thumb, I would say that no one should spend more time each day watching TV than they do praying. If they do, then what is really most important to them? For me, killing my TV was the only way I could keep that TV/praying time in proper balance.
Before I killed my TV, I found that I easily justified my TV watching because I only watched “good” shows and didn’t think that I watched over about an hour a day. But when I really examined my time in front of the tube, I found that it was much more wasteful than I thought and the shows I watched were more impure than I wanted to admit. Getting rid of my TV has led to far more worthwhile pursuits in my own life. But of course that is just my own personal experience, so your mileage may vary.
Almost anything is better than watching tv.
Although I have to admit renting my favorite Catholic movies are a nice way to end an evening!
My immediate family questioned my already questionable sanity the day the television was dismissed from service in my household. I live alone, so this made the task easy, but even before the “analog” eradication process, my decision was already made up. When I would flip through the channels of cable (on some other household telly), or viewed a general outline of what was being offered, the selection and quality of programmes did not coincide with the exorbitant price that person was paying for the service.
I would imagine the situation that would entail if one had children. There would no doubt be some rebellions fostered. No matter, it would soon pass with time and proper understanding of whom is the parent and who is the child, distinction psychologists have seemed to have very much blurred today. Children today are sadly denied a great deal of simple pleasures that can be found without sitting in front of a box. They should be able to be entertained with cartoons and games, but to a reasonable extent, and in it’s own proper time of the daily routine. One of the greatest gifts a parent can give a child is their time and opportunities to contribute to the welfare of themselves, through work, prayer and study.
It is not the technology that creates the problem, but how it is used. Television can be very educational, as has been proven in the past. Sesame Street was instrumental in teaching many useful skills, while entertaining us in the process. It was a stroke of genius in its very format and presentation. Bloody violence, gore and destruction teach certain qualities as well, but not in the same way. It is more difficult to construct a proper sentence when one has a machete in ones hand. At that point, words seem less useful to the child in order to express themselves, but they do find them. Being exposed to that sort of entertainment, limits their word choices down to the very words that, if we were to have uttered in our day, would have lead right to the kitchen sink for a good mouth washing.
The Internet has replaced the television, and is really more useful, but I say this with some reserve. It is more “programmable” and the ability to choose what one sees is vastly more educationally useful than any cable company offers, even with some of their better children’s educational programming today. One just has to learn what is proper and what is trash. Most of the Internet sites are trash, but one can sift through that trash and string a rather nice group of pearls together, if they search properly. Children are able to obtain information in this age that we (I am ancient) had to tramp to the public library to obtain. Libraries are phasing out, unfortunately, but the museum will always be there, I believe.
The real task is to be aware and educated enough to know the information you are viewing is CORRECT. What is correct, one might ask? It is a sad fact one would have to ask. Correct is that which one can learn something that promotes a better person, morally and spiritually. The educative process seemingly ends for some when they leave high school or college, and this is a big problem today. People offer opinions based on limited understandings and not solutions based on solid moral teachings or understandings of the teaching of the Church. Half truths are now, nor ever be, acceptable in a society that wishes to progress.
One’s children learn from what they are presented. All information is useful to some purpose, but not all information is conducive to knowing what is the truth. The death of the television was immanent, now we must learn to control the Internet. So far, it seems too early to tell of the long term problems the internet creates, but as a tool, it can be very useful in many ways. The measure of the usefulness of any tool is how well it is put to work in constructive way. But a hammer can destroy as well as build, so we must always be aware of what others and we may be doing with that tool.