Time for TV
Between the ages of 5 and 13, I did not sleep in a bedroom. My family lived in a two-bedroom apartment. My sisters got one of the bedrooms and my parents got the other. For me, they had to be creative. You can read more about all my sleeping places in my blog from 2007: http://www.hdhstory.net/Storyblog/?p=25. My first pseudo bedroom was in the foyer, where my bed was placed next to our piano. What was cool about its placement was that I had a direct view of the television in the living room. That meant that I could watch anything that my parents were watching without them realizing it, as long as I kept very quiet and faked sleeping whenever anyone came near me. I got to watch a lot of shows that became my favorites as I grew older. Among them were Million Dollar Movie and the Honeymooners. It is possible that this led to my addiction to television at a very young age. Move forward now to 2018 and the number of things that are on TV nowadays. It’s probably better for Otto and Lina to describe the present day issues.
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Lina came into the living room and sat down on the sofa next to Otto. “So what do we have to watch on TV tonight?”
Otto was curt. “What don’t we have to watch on TV? Between the two of us, there are 4 different programs that we like to watch just today. One on PBS, two on CBS and one on ABC. Then there are the Comedy Central shows we like to watch after 11:00 at night, except we don’t watch them live, we tape them so we can add them to tomorrow’s list!”
“We do have a lot of shows that are good,” Lina interjected.
“But we’re not finished yet.” Otto continued. “Since we subscribe to Netflix and Amazon Prime there are all those special series that don’t come out once a week but come at us as a whole season all at once. Thirteen hour-long episodes that we have queued up so we can binge watch if we ever find a day with 13 hours free.”
Again Lina interrupted. “But eventually we do catch up and get to watch everything. Don’t we?”
Otto was quick to reply. “There’s just too many choices. A lot of the time we continue watching series, even when we’ve grown tired of them. We need to manage our TV time better and start to weed out the bad stuff.”
Lina got a smile on her face. “That sounds good, how about we start with all the hockey and baseball games you watch?”
“WHAT! Why should I stop watching sports I like? I’m watching live broadcasts, not taped broadcasts. If I know the score ahead of time, I don’t watch them. Besides, once my teams are eliminated, I don’t watch as much.”
Lina acquiesced. “You’re right on all counts. I don’t mind watching sports games with you and we do need to manage our TV turn on time better. It’s so hard, because we like so many programs, both individually and together.”
Otto sighed, “Sometimes I wish TV was like what it was when I was a child. There were only 5 stations you could choose from and those stations shut down late at night. You could fall asleep to the test pattern on the TV or just white noise.”
Lina ended by saying, “But look at all we would miss.”
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And there you have it. What they didn’t talk about was all the news/weather programs that exist, not to mention all the movie/special channels like HBO and Showtime. We live in an over-indulged information age. Add to that computers, video games, and apps, and you’ve created a society that lives on a screen. As good as all those programs may be it’s still a screen and a chunk of your life.
