Relax, you're soaking in it...
Yesterday, as I was driving Inna to the airport, we passed a billboard for the new movie "Enough". Inna made a comment about how she'd had more than her fill of the leading actress, Jennifer Lopez, who apparently is an all-pervasive mass media star. I shrugged and told her that there were definite benefits to not being saturated by the mass media; I couldn't have named the actress for any amount of money, nor do I have any idea what she's done before "Enough" or why she's popular.
You see, I made a decision years ago to try an experiment. At the time, I was moving into Boston proper and decided to stop watching television, stop going to movies, and sell my car. That was eight years ago, and I've never had reason to reconsider.
Why? Well, let's start with the car. After I moved into town, I found that I really wasn't using it much. Then I calculated that it was costing me about $9000 a year to have, between car payments, repairs, maintenance, gas, parking, tolls, excise tax, tickets, insurance, and everything else. It just wasn't worth it. So I started buying MBTA passes, broke out the bike again, walked more, had my groceries delivered, and rented or borrowed a car for the rare times I really needed one. All in all, losing the car turned out to be a big win. I do miss it sometimes, simply for the joy of driving, but that's hardly worth $9000 a year to me.
Giving up movies wasn't a big deal, because I've never been a big moviegoer. I really only mention it because it's one of those things that people can't seem to fathom living without. But I find most movies, especially American movies, painfully formulaic and predictable, and my need for dramatic storytelling is well fulfilled by the reading I have to do for DargonZine. The way I figured it, there are better ways to spend $20 and three hours of my life. These days I do go out to see a few very carefully selected movies, but very few, and rarely anything that's "big" or mainstream.
But giving up television? That tends to shock a lot of people. Back in '94, when I looked at what I was going out of my way to watch (Jeopardy, NASCAR auto racing, and NBA basketball), I just couldn't justify spending $35 per month for cable. The final straw -- virtually the last thing I saw before pulling the plug -- was the pathetically overdramatized OJ Simpson "low-speed chase" along the highways of Los Angeles. So when I moved, I didn't bother ordering cable, and figured I'd see how long I could survive. Amazingly, my life did actually get better. I had more time for writing and DargonZine, cycling, concertgoing, work, and sleep. So it's become a permanent situation.
Often people wonder how I possibly get my news without television. Actually, I find myself far better informed about the things I care about then anyone around me, and I often "scoop" my friends with news they haven't heard yet. I get concert listings and local happenings from the Boston Phoenix, the local alternative paper. But most of my news comes from the Internet. The Boston Globe's Boston.com site is a great source for local and national news. I supplement that with My Yahoo! for local, national, NBA, financial, and technology news. I get local weather directly from the National Weather Service, rather than a dumbed-down version edited by a 7th grade dropout with a toupee and the pseudoscientific title of "Meteorologist".
But beyond that, I am able to get more detailed news about specific areas of interest that television could never provide. I get future show dates for all my favorite local and national bands. I get tons of international cycling news and remarkable photography, as well as all kinds of news about local cycling. I get to read the comic strips that I specifically want, including the bisexual, polyamorous, BDSM-oriented "Jake the Rake". I get in-depth local transportation news. Complete weekly open house listings for my neighborhood. Event calendars for local early music, classical music, art studios, and author signings and readings. Upcoming album releases. Visiting warships. Detailed user interface design and Web developer news. Tons of local news from Boston, or my original home town, high school, college, or places I'd like to visit. Live flight data so that I can pick friends up at the airport without waiting. Financial news as soon as it's released. Try getting any of that through your boob tube! But I shouldn't need to tell you about the value of the Internet as a news medium.
Instead, I'll tell you what I lost when I gave up television: saturation by the mass media. I gave up knowing (or caring) who the hell Jennifer Lopez is. I gave up being bombarded by the same old inane and intentionally-annoying commercials, repeated several thousand times per year. I gave up having to sit through the tedium of the news media's fixation on one event for months at a time (the OJ trial, the Florida election recount, the 9/11 terrorist attacks, whatever they're following this year). Apparently I didn't give up anything worth keeping, because eight years later, I still haven't called the cable company.
Well, except to hook up my cable modem, of course...
Yes, I admit that I take a reactionary pleasure in telling people that I don't watch television. I enjoy shocking people. But if that were the only benefit, it wouldn't be worth it at all. In all honesty, I'm now endlessly better informed, have become more physically active, taken a more participatory role in my community, and gotten rid of the truckloads of annoyances and pointless angst that come with television saturation. The reason why I don't watch television is because my life's immensely better without it, as was so obviously demonstrated by Inna's irritation versus my complete lack of reaction to seeing a billboard featuring Jennifer Lopez... whoever she is.
Kill your television.
It's a no-brainer.