A long time ago, we made the decision to forgo Cable TV. Best decision we've ever made. The Comcast guy comes by periodically and asks why we don't have TV. "You could get such a better deal on your Internet," and every time I respond, "I'd pay NOT to have TV," and I know we do pay for not having TV. Because society "rewards" us for sitting like zombies in front of the TV.
There are a number of reasons NOT to have TV. The most important is that there are so many better things to do. Pick mushrooms, make tamales, walk through a forest, touch a glacier, identify animal scat, make sauerkraut, read a fricking book.
But wait. "How do you get news?" Well, firstly, nobody gets any reliable or useful news from Network or Cable TV. What you get are orchestrated shouting matches designed to make your blood boil so you will continue watching. We love conflict. We love tension. We even desperately and masochistically love being tooled by the media. With TV news, we get the equivalent of click-bait, paranoia-inducing drivel not unlike the "Sponsored Stories" on the Weather Channel website. But they pawn it off as "news."
If I wanted an orchestrated shouting match, I'd watch the WWF. A lot of what you get on social media is fear-mongering click bait, too, so similar rules apply when it comes to looking for news on social. You need a handful of "curator" smart friends who can sift through the propaganda. But yes, we do need to be slightly informed about the world, though lately I've found it's nice to be blissfully ignorant--there are so many things I don't want to know, as curious as I am. Fortunately, we get nuanced stories that investigate multiple perspectives by listening to NPR. We used to wake up listening to NPR, but unfortunately in their efforts to be "balanced," they still include the voices of the bozos. It sucks waking up to bozos, so we've turned to the public radio all-classical music/minimal talking King FM as a wake-up. The stories on NPR are a little bit too humanistic, so I balance that out with The Economist--always nice to get an economic, worldly perspective from across the pond, or the Wall Street Journal. Because money talks and bullshit walks--for the most part, you do get a more honest perspective of the world through an economic lens. Sadly. But reading the WSJ, you'd think humans had all become robots, economic machines maximizing ROI. So we have to return to NPR to remind ourselves that we are indeed humans, despite efforts towards the contrary. And not everything is money and materialism.
Do I miss sports? Hell yeah! But how many ways can you possibly stuff a ball into a goal? I'd been a sports fan for decades when I quit TV and I can't think of any new ways to make a catch, shoot a three, hit a ball over a wall, watch a tree stuff a ball into a hoop, nail a penalty kick. If you do a careful analysis, an American football game is 4 hours of advertisements punctuated by about 3 minutes and 22 seconds of action. To be quite honest, it's quite dull. I don't miss it enough to put up with all the hype.
Marketing guru Seth Godin so rightfully asks,
"What if the fear and malaise and anger isn't merely being reported by cable news...
What if it's being caused by cable news?
What if ubiquitous video accompanied by frightening and freaked out talking heads is actually, finally, changing our culture?
Which came first, the news or the news cycle?
We seem to accept the hegemony of bottom-feeding media as some natural outgrowth of the world we live in. In fact, it's more likely an artifact of the post-spectrum cable news complex in which bleeding and leading became business goals.
There's always front page news because there's always a front page.
The world is safer (per capita) than ever before in recorded history. And people are more frightened. The rise of the media matches the rise of our fear.
Cable news isn't shy about stating their goals. The real question is: what's our goal? Every time we hook ourselves up to a device that shocks us into a fear-based posture on a regular basis, we're making a choice about the world and how we experience it.
They want urgency more than importance. What do we want?"
Here's what I want: I want a world in which we can calmly and safely debate based on facts, not dogma. Science, not deeply held irrational beliefs. We're not getting that by consuming Cable or Network news. It's important to remember that fear sells, which is why political candidates use fear. Which is what Hitler used so effectively to subjugate an entire people.
Here's what I want: I want a world in which we can calmly and safely debate based on facts, not dogma. Science, not deeply held irrational beliefs. We're not getting that by consuming Cable or Network news. It's important to remember that fear sells, which is why political candidates use fear. Which is what Hitler used so effectively to subjugate an entire people.
