Kellie Irene Flynn says that she and her husband recently bought an
expensive new high definition TV, and a subscription to Netflix. She
watches a lot of documentary films, but the one thing she does not watch
is was is sometimes referred to as regular TV.
“I like what Groucho Marx once said about TV,” she said. “He said he found TV very educational, because every time someone turned it on, he went into another room to read a book.” She disagrees with those who say that a little TV doesn’t hurt anything. For one thing, she says there is no disagreement about what constitutes “a little TV.” According to one report, the average American watches more than thirty-four hours of TV every week.
“That’s a lot of TV,” she says. “Or to put it another way, that’s a lot of time you could spend with your family and friends, or doing something constructive. And make no mistake, watching TV is not constructive; it’s one of the most voluntarily passive things that we can do.” A former advertising executive named Jerry Mander saw this long ago, and wrote a seminal book called Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television.
Mander wrote that many of the problems with TV are inherent in the technology – that is, they are part and parcel to television itself. The effects of TV on human bodies and minds, what Mander called “the ingestion of artificial light,” are intrinsic to TV, and consequently the medium cannot be reformed.
Kellie Irene Flynn admits that since she likes to stream movies and watch DVDs, she is not completely free of the influence of television. And so she is not a vocal detractor of the medium. But she does everything she can to discourage excessive TV watching by her friends and family.
Sources: http://orthodoxinfo.com/praxis/four-arguments-for-the-elimination-of-television.aspx
http://www.eco-action.org/dt/elimtv.html
http://www.lifehack.org/articles/productivity/11-reasons-you-should-stop-watching-television-now.html
“I like what Groucho Marx once said about TV,” she said. “He said he found TV very educational, because every time someone turned it on, he went into another room to read a book.” She disagrees with those who say that a little TV doesn’t hurt anything. For one thing, she says there is no disagreement about what constitutes “a little TV.” According to one report, the average American watches more than thirty-four hours of TV every week.
“That’s a lot of TV,” she says. “Or to put it another way, that’s a lot of time you could spend with your family and friends, or doing something constructive. And make no mistake, watching TV is not constructive; it’s one of the most voluntarily passive things that we can do.” A former advertising executive named Jerry Mander saw this long ago, and wrote a seminal book called Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television.
Mander wrote that many of the problems with TV are inherent in the technology – that is, they are part and parcel to television itself. The effects of TV on human bodies and minds, what Mander called “the ingestion of artificial light,” are intrinsic to TV, and consequently the medium cannot be reformed.
Kellie Irene Flynn admits that since she likes to stream movies and watch DVDs, she is not completely free of the influence of television. And so she is not a vocal detractor of the medium. But she does everything she can to discourage excessive TV watching by her friends and family.
Sources: http://orthodoxinfo.com/praxis/four-arguments-for-the-elimination-of-television.aspx
http://www.eco-action.org/dt/elimtv.html
http://www.lifehack.org/articles/productivity/11-reasons-you-should-stop-watching-television-now.html
