After reading some works from Neil Postman and Todd Gitlin, I decided to examine my television-watching habits, as well as challenge myself. Over the last 2 weeks, I conducted to not-so-scientific experiments. First, I attempted to go an entire week with watching television, this included watching television programming, watching movies, viewing streaming content online, and playing videogames. Secondly, I decided to take a closer look at how much time I spent during a week watching television, and what exactly I was watching.
A week without television seemed like a walk in the park. I never thought of myself as someone who watches a lot of TV, but the obstacles were many. I started my experiment on a Sunday, which meant that I would be missing football. This proved to be more difficult than I thought, since my girlfriend and I have made it quite a habit to wake up on Sundays, make breakfast together, then sit down and watch football games while we read the paper, etc. As a sports fan, now is a difficult time to go without TV. There are football games on, both college and professional, the baseball playoffs are in full swing, and the NBA pre-season is underway. But I found that occupying my time with a nice stack of books took most of the sting out of a week without watching sports.
The greatest challenge really surprised me, though: avoiding TV while not at home. I realized very quickly just how many places have television readily available. Restaurants, bars, the gym, and waiting rooms often have televisions. Even my local supermarket has a television, though I had never noticed it before depriving myself of TV. Also, I never realized how many of my regular social activities involved watching television. I went over to a friend’s house for dinner one night, and, sure enough, they wanted to watch a movie after we ate. Needless to say, it was difficult to explain to them why I had to call it a night so early. To be honest, I thought that going without TV was going to be much easier. What surprised me most is how little I missed it after a little while. Thought I would be anxious to pick up the remote and dive back into some mind-numbing sitcom, or catch up on all my favorite teams. But when the next Sunday morning rolled around, I found myself truly enjoying a quiet morning, sitting down to breakfast and reading a little Harry Potter. I do feel that taking the time away from the television helped me connect better with the writings of Postman and Gitlin, especially Postman. Though I wasn’t ready to fully embrace Postman’s point of view regarding technology and media, I do think that I was understanding him more thoroughly, and from a while new perspective.
Over the next week, I returned to some semblance of my normal television viewing routine. This idea grew directly out of Gitlin’s claim that Americans spend about 40% of their free time watching television. After reading this statistic, I started wondering how close to this number I was, so I kept a simple log to monitor my viewing habits. First off, I needed to figure out about how much free time I have in a given week. So I factored in my work schedule, school schedule, including reading and homework, my extracurricular activities such as clubs, time spent at the gym, my weekly indoor soccer league, my sleep schedule, and all of my miscellaneous time, and came up with a rough estimate of how many hours of free time I have and how much of that is spent watching TV. I defined free time as time not spent working, going to school or doing school-related work, or sleeping. Using this definition, I found that I have about 70 hours of free time at my disposal each week. I realize that this may be a little more than the average person, given that I am not married, do not have kids, and do not work full time. So, how much of that time was spent watching television?
After tracking my television viewing for one week, I found that I watch, on average, 2.7 hours of television each day. That’s almost 19 hours per week. That means I spend about 28% of my free time watching TV, which is less than the average of 40% as noted by Gitlin in his book Media Unlimited (2003, p. 16). But I decided to break my data down further. My average daily television viewing is less than the national average, which is a little more than 4 hours per day per person, according to the non-profit group TV-Free America. Furthermore, almost 70% of my television viewing is sports-related programming. The rest of my viewing is divided among news, “educational” programming (The Discovery Channel, The Learning Channel, The History Channel, etc.) and, of course sitcoms, reality television, and dramas. Also, I found that I am much more likely to watch shows broadcast in high definition, than those broadcast in standard definition, as evidenced by my watching numerous college football games involving teams I know or care nothing about (which were presented in HD), rather than watching the Major League Baseball playoffs (which were not broadcast in HD), even though I generally prefer to watch baseball over football, and the MLB postseason is far more “significant” competition-wise, and the MLB playoffs involved at least two teams which I regularly follow.
What do these findings mean? To others, not a lot; but to me, they are indicative of what I am interested in and what I prioritize. I am confident that my viewing habits are not unique, and therefore relatively uninteresting to others. But, I do feel that self-examination is very important. Since taking the time to monitor my TV viewing, I have decided to reduce my viewing time. The biggest step I am taking is to keep the TV off when I am not actively watching it. Often, I find myself turning on the TV just for “background noise,” not realizing the impact that has on my concentration and focus while trying to accomplish other tasks. The other major way I am limiting my television viewing is by tuning into sporting events that I am less interested in simply to check the score, or checking the score online instead, and tuning into highlight/recap shows to find out the days events. I believe that by taking these simple steps I can reduce my daily television viewing dramatically.
Sources
(2004). Television and health. Retrieved October 9, 2008, from CSU Northridge Sciences
Web site:
http://www.csun.edu/science/health/docs/tv&health.html
Gitlin, Todd (2003). Media Unlimited. New York, NY: Macmillan.
Monday, October 13, 2008
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