This week is the misguided TV Turnoff Week. I’m quite tired of much of the simplistic rhetoric that accompanies this event. By all means, let’s have a Watch The Wire Week, Watch with Your Kids Week, or other encouragements to watch really good television, or to watch socially, but the simplicity of the event seems an odd throwback to the 60s, when McLuhan and others were convincing people that “Television” was one thing. Well, television now fills thousands of channels worldwide, with many many genres, thousands of programs of various shapes and sizes, etc., and yet still we have people who pretend that any and all television is a scourge on society. So Lost is The Tyra Banks Show is Meet the Press is Iron Chef is Game Seven of the Stanley Cup Playoffs is a Presidential Inauguration Address is Home Shopping Network is an indy film on the Sundance Channel is Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood is Entertainment Tonight…? Whah? Sure, and brick houses are like spatulas are like fungal cream are like the meaning of love, right?
The proposed alternatives to television are often quaint and cute, but steeped in nostalgia and naivety. This is how the game goes: you pick the worst that (you feel) television has to offer, then imagine that by turning television off, you and your family and the whole world will (while singing Cumbaya and lighting peace candles together) experience the very best of any other activity. So, for instance: “just think, instead of watching yet more Hills, or Jerry Springer, or Fox News, we could be reading Shakespeare, learning to make a kite, or starting a knitting circle!” But in the interests of fairness, let’s reverse the game: instead of watching The Wire, Sesame Street, Planet Earth, The Simpsons, or any number of other wonderfully intelligent, eye-opening, socially conscious programs, your children could be leafing through dad’s stash of porn mags, reading Ann Coulter’s latest, indulging in Mein Kampf, or perhaps simply out in the park torturing insects and making fun of people who look different.
Therein lies the silly logic of TV Turnoff Week, with the notion that you can get someone to do something that you want them to do by telling them not to do one of a million other possible alternatives. So where’s the Don’t Sit on a Chair Week (“think of all the wonderful exercise people might get, and of all the marathons they’d be forced to run!”), Don’t Talk to Your Friends Week (“think of how many people would instead venture into their local inner city, start to volunteer, and really learn about what it means to be poor if this happened!”), or the No Cheese Week (“think of how your children would instead eat organic vegetables and would snack on the foods of the oppressed peoples of the world”). Yes, I’m being sarcastic. But it’s hard not to when the premise of TV Turnoff Week is as naive in its hopes that by not watching television, the world will somehow become better, not worse people. Not doing A doesn’t mean that I do B — it may mean that I do C – Z.
I know that the explanation from many is that it’s more about realizing how reliant one is on television. But unless we accept the barely concealed (and often, explicitly announced) assumption that television is somehow druglike (and there’s a whole other rant on the problems with that line of attack: luckily, Jason Mittell’s written this one, sparing me the work, so I’ll refer you to his excellent essay in Television and New Media, linked to here), I’m not sure I see how much more enlightening it is to know what a world without television looks like than it is to know what a world without chairs or cheese is like.
Besides, the way television works today, you can’t really turn it off. So, for instance, how many of those people turning their televisions off this week wanted to know the Pennsylvania primary results last night? Did they cheat and turn it on (tsk, tsk: how dare you show civic engagement)? Did they turn to the Internet instead (likely consulting CNN or MSNBC — ie: two television companies)? Did they get the results from asking a friend who was watching television (thereby proving television’s ability to start socially meaningful and important conversations. But we don’t approve of those either, I take it?)? Or if they waited till the morning papers, or if they got their news from an online newspaper (many of whom collate info from television sites themselves, btw), what’s the special virtue gained there?
I’m being hard on the TV Turnoff’ers, yes. By doing so, I don’t mean to deride the often very noble goals that are behind their activism — get kids to engage in a variety of activities, encourage more physical activity, encourage more social activity. To use the old cliche, I have friends who are TV Turnoff’ers. And they’re good people whose hearts are completely in the right place. But some of the above goals can be achieved through television (how many people engaging in physical activities were in some way influenced to do them through television? As a kid, whenever I played soccer or hockey, it was motivated by a desire to be like Zico or Gretzky, two guys I only saw on television), some of them already are (social activity often precedes, accompanies, and follows television watching), and others can be promoted without making television a pawn. Want your kids to exercise more? Go play catch with them. On any week. Indeed, a final objection to lodge against TV Turnoff Week is that it pens in one’s activist urges to one week. Rather than making whatever activity you’d rather people be doing than watching television seem like an oddity that’s only engaged in once a year, work for it throughout the year. Eating a wonderful turkey dinner once a year at Thanksgiving, for instance, doesn’t make me want to cook such a dinner on other days — it just makes me appreciate doing it once a year.
So turn your television on. Just watch something good.
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