It’s been 12 years since we sold our television set. To be fair, we do have a modest DVD player and we show our kids plenty of inappropriate movies. Have you ever seen the blood and gore in Kenneth Branaugh’s Henry V?
Several things happen when you get rid of your television:
1. Your furniture ends up in a circle, rather than an arc.
2. You go to bed earlier. Nightfall is nature’s way of saying, "Might’s well turn in, eh?"
3. Conversation and reading fill the void.
Doris Lessing describes the time when television came to England. For uncountable
generations, families would finish dinner with the women going to the
kitchen to clean up and the men going to the parlor to solve the
world’s problems. The women would, of course, correct the men from the
kitchen. And life was warm.
Then, like a cloud sweeping the nation, everyone bought television
sets. And the conversation stopped. The men watched television while
the women cleaned up. A thousand years of conversation stopped as the
technological cloud passed over.
Perhaps you might want to learn more? Consider the The Center for Screen-Time Awareness who plan year-round for the annual Turnoff Week. The 2009 week is April 20-26.