72 hour television ban

Photo Credit: Early Visual Media Archeology

I wasn't too worried about experiencing television withdrawal during last week's 72-hour-ban on moving pictures. Throughout the week my schedule doesn't allow for too much tv time. I already get my news from NPR each morning (I've got a pretty long commute) or I check the BBC website in between emails. So I wasn't feeling disoriented or out-of-touch, at least, not more than usual. I do watch television, but it's usually limited to Dr. Who marathons or Hulu broadcasts of Modern Family during the weekend. My husband watches practically no television, and my friends are all hippies who haven't had a television since they gave up meat in the 80s. Or they're self-proclaimed academics who hide their televisions behind tasteful antique armoirs when they're not watching C-SPAN. Either way, they claim they don't watch tv, and they certainly don't talk about watching tv. So I felt no pressure to watch myself during the past week.

I had more trouble avoiding YouTube videos. One classmate wanted to show me a clip about Miami during an evening course. Twice, my husband wanted to show me a guitar demo; I had to content myself with listening from the other side of his laptop. Even I thought I might want to check out a clip that demonstrates how a teacher might annotate a paragraph, which would have fallen under the purely-educational-and-therefore-exempted-from-the-ban category. The benefit of moving pictures is that you can see what's going on. While a page about how to code a passage might be useful, it can also be vague if the topic is unfamiliar. How helpful it would be, I thought, to see something in action. To see how a process is executed, and how the parts work in relation to each other. Ultimately, I couldn't find a clip about annotating texts, but it did contemplate for a moment about the utility of moving pictures.

Of course, I realize that a lot of moving images are also pretty useless. And it was also online where I noticed how advertisements, pretty devoid of substance unless you count the motive to get us to buy something, often straddle the line between moving pictures and still images. When visiting the IKEA website, for instance, I was met with swirling graphics as price values danced over pieces of furniture. Was this a "movie"? Should I avert my eyes? It only lasted for a few seconds before the photograph stilled, but it still made me feel guilty. I had a similar experience with an Expedia page. While I had expected to be bombarded with film images in my everyday surroundings, I'm not sure that prediction panned out. It was in my cyber-environments, instead, where I felt the sneaky movements of film media.

Now, I don't want to give the impression that the tv ban was wholly uneventful. It was a bit tricky on Friday evening, when my husband suggested we watch a movie that evening. I told him no, the 72 hours didn't end until midnight on Friday. Then I started making excuses: "Although, technically, I haven't been watching any television since Monday morning. So I've gone above and beyond the 72 hour limit. The point, after all, it to go a certain time frame without watching television."

"Nope," my husband countered. "Monday doesn't count because you had the option to watch television, if you wanted to. The point is that its absence should have an effect."

So we didn't go out to watch a movie. We went shopping instead. And yes, I realize that we essentially replaced one form of consumerism with another, more expensive, one. Which probably goes to show that I'm not being persuaded to buy things from television or movie messages. I didn't switch the kind of media I consume because I already spend hours online each day. And it's more likely that's the place I'm being influenced from.