Today we cancelled our cable television subscription and will henceforth use the television set only as a monitor for watching films on DVD. This is something I've wanted to do for many years, but it took a while for my wife to agree to the idea. At one time she watched a number of programs on a regular basis but gradually eliminated them from her schedule as they lost interest for her. The last obstacle was her love for the New York Mets, as without our cable subscription she couldn't watch the games at home. But recent Mets seasons have been very difficult to stomach, and in the last two she stopped watching games well before July. Spring will come again, of course, but she has alternatives to TV, including the far less costly MLB.com, not to mention the still-compelling radio broadcasts.
My own relationship to television goes back to childhood. I can recall exposure to hulking, wood-encased black-and-white sets in relatives' homes in the late 1960s and early 1970s, with color sets arriving in my home by the mid-1970s. I was a pretty avid TV viewer as a child, and I was especially fond of old horror films and comedy serials, though I pretty much watched everything. Sometimes I got overly assertive about what I wanted to watch, behavior that would prompt older relatives to remind me of just how privileged I was to have a television, because "when I was a kid there was no TV!" Although this comment was intended to impress me with my elders' relative deprivation, I eventually came to regard their childhood world as more of a lost paradise.
When I was seven years old my family moved from the downtown Hackensack neighborhood I'd known since infancy and relocated to the other side of town. Until then we'd been living in a second floor apartment in my mom's parents' house, but with the move my mom and dad acquired a house of their own. This was a major step up the social mobility ladder for my parents - both came from working-class backgrounds and neither attended college. My father hadn't even turned 30 yet. Talk about paradise lost!
For me, however, the move was extremely traumatic. I left school and neighborhood friends I loved and found it difficult to make friends on my new block. One of my earliest memories of being at my new home was being hazed by some kids who thought it would be fun to distract me and dump handfuls of dirt down the back of my shirt. When I did manage to become buddies with another boy on the block his family quickly left for another town, so I was back to square one. At school I had done well; so well, in fact, that I was double-promoted and bypassed the first grade, but this - along with my December birthday - meant I would always be the youngest person in my class for many years to come, and it became a further source of social isolation.
While many responses were possible, I made the unfortunate decision to turn inward and retreated into my house where my closest companion became the television set. For the next five years I was a TV addict. In addition to regular children's programming like Saturday morning network shows and cartoons, I quickly expanded my viewing schedule to include weekday afternoon game shows, sit-com reruns, movies, and prime-time programming. Sometimes neighborhood kids would knock on my door to call me outside, but most of the time I'd refuse to go out and eventually the kids stopped coming by. I often lobbied my parents to stay up past my regular bedtime in order to finish watching something. I looked forward each summer to TV Guide magazine's "Fall Preview" issue and went through it in detail so I could plan my schedule around new shows I wanted to watch. It was pathetic.
By some miracle I still managed to maintain good grades in school, but my early habits of independent reading were severely disrupted during these years. Not surprisingly I also got far less exercise and began gaining weight. As time went on, I slowly started to recognize how TV was rendering me more passive and I grew to hate much of the programming, but like any addict I found it hard to stop. What compelled me to keep turning on the set was hard to say, though the comfort of habit may have had something to do with it. By comparison with present-day standards and practices, TV advertising in the 1970s was pretty quaint, but it was still pernicious and there is no doubt I was influenced by it, with its mind-numbing repetition and its promotion of endless consumption. To this day I still have plenty of jingles and marketing slogans in my head.
For the most part, my parents didn’t regard my many hours in front of the TV as a cause for concern. There was still some lingering novelty about TV and the very aggressive child marketing industry had not yet exploded into the monstrous entity it has become in recent decades. But the corporate swill it churned out every day - message after message preaching a gospel of passive consumerism, a focus on the self, and short-term thinking - was relentless. I just didn’t yet have a framework for getting outside of it and seeing it for what it was, or a language to describe it.
In the end, it was another traumatic experience that snapped me out of my TV-induced catatonia when my father fell ill and died from cancer in 1978, shortly after I turned 13. From that point forward I could no long stomach the shallow, empty drivel that seemed to be the only thing on offer from TV and I forced myself back into the social world of my peers. Over the next few years I acquired some distance from television and got my brain back into gear by reading, writing, and thinking. In college I met a professor who told me he never owned a television set and could not imagine having one because it was owned and controlled by corporations that offered nothing but propaganda and infantile escapist fantasies. Then I began reading some of the major works that explained my television experience to me in a way that finally made sense, things like Marie Winn's The Plug-In Drug: Television, Children, and the Family (1977), Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985), Stuart Ewen's several books on mass media, Bill McKibben's The Age of Missing Information (1992), Susan Linn's Consuming Kids: The Hostile Takeover of Childhood (2004), Juliet B. Schor's Born to Buy: The Commercialized Child and the New Consumer Culture (2005), and other things. By my mid-20's I became quite hostile to TV and bitterly lamented the years I'd wasted on it.
With the arrival of my first daughter in 2001 I stepped up the lobbying with my wife to get rid of the TV entirely. By this time the child marketing juggernaut had grown to a massive scale and I was determined to stand in its way. My wife agreed we should severely restrict the amount of time our daughter could watch TV, but she wasn't quite ready to get rid of it. When I discussed TV with friends and relatives I was amused that so many tried to persuade me it had some worthy content, pointing to PBS and other meager fare; but this was pretty unconvincing. When our second daughter arrived I was horrified that she exhibited a tendency to focus on TV to the exclusion of everything else and would get upset and agitated when we insisted on turning it off even after she had spent hours watching one silly Disney or Nickelodeon show after another. As she was also giving us quite a battle on the reading front I began to get increasingly concerned about where this might go. It was time to pull the plug.
I realize many people will regard this as an "extreme" move, but I can't be concerned about that. I'm not so stupid or naive as to think this move means my daughters will not be exposed to the evils of corporate marketing and the systematic "education" it attempts to foist on children (and especially girls) around the clock. Nor is such "protection" my goal. But at least we have now banished one very important source of poison from our home and staked out some free space where our minds can grow with less of the non-stop hostile noise brought by "sponsors" who make us pay for the privilege of learning how to become passive consumer drones. With this space, I hope to equip my daughters with the understanding and tools - and weapons - to come to terms with the society and culture in which they live by forming their own judgments. All I want is to give them that chance, and now I think it will be easier.
Goodbye, TV. We won't miss you.
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