Chris, I agree with Karen — there’s nothing wrong with being a teevee snob. My wife and I have not owned a television for our entire 13-year marriage (nor, for that matter, the more than 17 years we have been together). We do not believe we have have missed much.
I have never liked teevee (mostly because it was something my parents did, and my family life was less than stellar), and found that it is easier to have a “relationship” with a fictional character than it is to have a real relationship with a real human being, creating both artificial social connections through the character as well as creating adult-sized imaginary friends. Some teevee programming is more compelling than others (Jen and I rent DVDs from Netflix and watch them on our computer), but Chris got the point just right — watch the specific program or movie, and not the teevee.
Not long after moving into a new apartment in Alexandria after I had graduated from Georgetown, we got a call from the happy folks at Comcast. Which cable deal did we want? I told them we did own a television. There was silence, then laughter. “You’re kidding, right?” the operator asked. “Nope,” I said. More laughter as she told every other operator in the boiler room “This guy says he don’t own no teevee!” followed by lots of laughter and “That is THE lamest excuse I’ve ever heard.” She hung up on me.
For almost all of my adolescence and adult life, I have gotten most of my news from the radio — specifically international shortwave. (I was a long-time partisan of BBC World Service, but it is nowhere as intellectually rigorous as it used to be…) But generally my view of the world is “unmediated,” and I think it helps. Teevee does a poor job of portraying ANYTHING realistically or with any complexity, and it is almost incapable of communicating ideas — at least well-articulated ideas. Teevee teaches people to be afraid of the world around them and creates a false sense of immediacy and intimacy. Empathy is a hard enough feeling to cultivate in human beings, but teevee’s world replaces real empathy with a simulacrum, a self-righteous false sympathy that allows people to be both callous to suffering yet demand “something be done about it” at the same time. In creating its artificial and imaginary connections between real and fake people, it atrophies the ability to foster real and sincere connections between real human beings.
The word “teevee,” by the way, comes from a 1950s Pogo cartoon. Just like I spell out “okay” (to the chagrin of every editor I have ever worked for), I also think “T.V.” needs a full spelling too.
11:53 am on February 4, 2006
