But then we leave the house. We go to the health club and there’s Oprah chatting about incest on two wide screens above the treadmills. And in the club’s day-care center, where we leave our 5-year-old, the television is blasting kidvid.
We take our little girl to the pediatrician’s office and find a set tuned to Special Report Television, which promotes health insurance and pharmaceuticals. When images of a violent drug bust flash on the screen (part of an anti-drug message), all the children become fascinated. We ask the nurse to turn the set off. “It can’t be turned off,” she says, smiling.
We go to a baseball game. What could be more outdoorsy? An immense TV monitor the size of Grant’s Tomb draws our attention throughout. It’s useful for the occasional instant replay, but after every three outs it pounds us with loud, unzappable ads for blue jeans, soft drinks, chewing gum, the local bank, the local supermarket–and the new lineup of television shows.
We go out to eat. A shouting television, like an offensive drunk, drives us from the bars of upscale restaurants as well as family-style eateries. Even at the grocery store, TV sputters among the soda cans.
We take our car in for an oil change and carry a book along to read while we wait. But there It perches, like Poe’s raven, high in the corner of the waiting room, squawking about which price is right. No one in the room is paying attention to it, but no one can concentrate on anything else, either.
These days we find ourselves identifying with Winston in George Orwell’s “1984,” who discovered that “The instrument [the telescreen, it was called] could be dimmed, but there was no way of shutting it off completely”
And so, when people ask us how it is to be without TV, we tell them we don’t know. Our child doesn’t know either. Soon after we’d pulled the plug, we enrolled her in a day camp at a prestigious private school that offered water play, science demonstrations, field trips, art projects, stories–all kinds of imaginative programs for preschoolers. Tucked into the list was “films.” They should have called it Television Camp. The set was on every day at nap time, as well as in the morning when it rained, on Fridays for a “treat” and when a teacher had trouble managing the kids.
It may be that, having disconnected our own television, we’re extra sensitive to all the TVs around us. Smokers who kick the habit, they say, are often irked by other people’s smoke. On the other hand, sometimes there’s an awful lot of smoke in the air. Maybe we need a television equivalent of the smoke alarm. Too much video in public places and a buzzer sounds.
Television saturates our lives so completely that it doesn’t occur to people to object to it. We all just assume that secondhand video is harmless. But that’s what they used to say about secondhand smoke.
Educators bemoan the shortening attention span of TV-addicted students and their inability to pursue a line of thought to its conclusion. The problem is not just with students. We’re all TV-impaired. Whether the set is in our rec room, the departure lounge or the pediatrician’s office, the result is the same: we can’t concentrate. The big new federal study on literacy reports that barely half of adults can make sense of what they read–this in the era of the much vaunted Information Highway. Of course, television is not solely responsible for this appalling state of affairs, but it must share the blame. Our nation’s romance with the tube and subsequent divorce from literature have compromised our ability to persevere in mental tasks, or even to value perseverance. Americans break for commercials. As a marketing experiment, someone ought to open a restaurant and advertise it as a “video-free environment.” Or open a school and announce that television–yes, even “educational” programs will not be used as a teaching aid. “All classes will be taught by an actual human being,” the brochure would read.
If the idea flopped, we’d learn something valuable (if scary) about ourselves. We’d learn that we love television so much that we’ll stare at it every chance we get, no matter how inappropriate the context or vapid the content. From there it is but a short leap to imagine a brave new world of Orwellian intrusiveness, in which viewing is valued over doing, and “virtual reality” is preferred to the real thing.
But what if the idea took hold? What if video-free stores, lobbies, day-care centers and waiting rooms turned out to have public appeal? What if all this time we’d been tolerating TV in public places because we didn’t think we had a choice? We’ve heard so much from network apologists about free speech that we have forgotten other rights. What about noise pollution? What about thought pollution? What about the right to privacy–the right to daydream, read a book, write a poem without electronic interference?
Soon video-free zones, small pockets of resistance, would spring up around the country. Before long, celebrities would spot the trend and make it “in” to turn off the tube. Sequential thinking might be reintroduced, first as a parlor game like Trivial Pursuit and ultimately as a normal human function.
But like all revolutions, this one must start with individuals, people gutsy enough to stand up in a crowded room and say for all to hear, “Would anybody mind if I turned this thing off?”
