Living Without Television

This past week, my mass communication class was engaged in an assignment during which we could not watch television for 72 hours.

Needless to say, this proved to be more difficult that I could have originally imaged.

At the beginning of our 72 hour period, I admit I allowed myself to feel a little too over-confident. I don’t watch a lot of television during the school year – at least not compared to many college students I know – so in my mind this “fasting” of TV was going to be a piece of cake. No problem.

Yet isn’t it always the same story: you never quite know how much you depend on something until you can’t have it anymore.

The very day that the assignment began, I found out that there was going to be a recount of votes for the governor’s election in Minnesota, where I go to school. Whenever I would return to my dorm room after a class, my roommate would be nestled on our futon in front of our beautiful flat screen TV, listening to the commentator reflect on the candidates, the close race and the recount that was unfolding before her. Yet I had to force myself to turn my head as a walked past, arguing against the tiny little part of me that wanted to throw caution to the wind and break the terms of the assignment…

But I prevailed. Instead, I listened sullenly to the newscaster relaying the events, and then I kept myself informed by frequently visiting online news sources and bothering my friends with requests for updates on all the drama. In fact, I realized that without television I depended on the people around me for a lot of my information, whether it was the election or a plot overview of my favorite shows.

Probably the hardest part of the experiment was how it affected my social life. I never realized how central TV is when I am in a social situation. When I was babysitting one night, I realized that Bob the Builder is the most interesting show in the world when it’s in front of me and I’m not allowed to watch it. During my friend’s birthday party, I had to hope and pray that we would end up playing a game instead of watching his favorite movie (thankfully we did…).

One day, I was looking up music on YouTube with a friend, and it wasn’t until I was 30 seconds into a music video that I realized I had been absorbed in the moving images without even considering that I shouldn’t be. Situations like this are so fundamental in my everyday life, and I that fact that I had to purposefully avoid them tells me that TV is more constant than I had previously believed.

For three days, I survived by using the internet, newspapers and word of mouth as my new favorite mediums. It was more difficult than I thought it would be, but in a way it was nice not having that distraction.

I sure got an awful lot of homework done.