December 30, 2005
There's
No Escaping TV
By Froma
Harrop
That comatose figure
before the television is me. And the images flickering in her
face are not of the Berlin Philharmonic playing Bartok or documentaries
on China. They are "The Planet's Funniest Animals" or
reruns of "The Munsters."
I watch television,
and I use it as a drug. Let no one call me a television snob.
But let me also draw a line in the sandbox: Free humans should
never have television forced on them. This is happening more and
more, and it gives me the creeps. I know others who feel likewise.
There's no escaping
TV. It's in the doctor's office, the gym and the jury-pool waiting
room. It's in the bar, whether there's a game on or not. It's
at the airport, where CNN holds everyone hostage. Note how the
monitors are carefully placed around the boarding areas so that
no seat is beyond their grasp.
Hospital waiting
rooms are perpetually under television domination. The detainees
may want to read, pray or listen to their own thoughts. They are
not allowed to. Television must be watched.
Your writer recently
wasted nearly an hour of her life in a hospital waiting room,
controlled by CBS's "The Early Show." The program was
a parade of promotions pretending to be feature stories.
There were in-depth
"interviews" with the stars of the CBS show "How
I Met Your Mother." Next was a news-impersonating item meant
to stir interest in an upcoming "60 Minutes." Then came
the "real'' commercials, for Listerine and Wal-Mart.
The hospital staff
sent me to one of those smaller, inner waiting rooms, and for
that I gave thanks. But there was no relief in the new quarters,
where another TV blared out "Good Morning America" on
ABC.
I recently had my
car serviced. The customers' lounge had a television, and, of
course, it was on. Fortunately, there was a children's playroom,
separated from the waiting area by a glass door. The partition's
purpose was to shield grown-ups from the noise of children. But
I went there to avoid the noise of TV. I squeezed into a tiny
yellow chair and read a magazine.
"Everywhere
you go, the TV is in your face," says Frank Vespe, executive
director of the TV-Turnoff Network. His group encourages Americans
to watch less television. Putting in less screen time, Vespe says,
will improve people's health and promote community. TV-Turnoff
Network distributes fact sheets asserting that the average child
spends more time in front of a television than in the classroom
-- and that's not counting the hours playing video games or at
the computer screen.
Mitch Altman also
feels persecuted by the omnipresent television. He sees it in
diners, taxicabs and wherever there is a captive audience. He's
even seen televisions behind the urinals in a restaurant men's
room. "Brilliant yet evil people decided that they can put
a TV with advertisements right there," he said.
Unlike most of us,
Altman did something about it -- and for profit. He invented a
product called TV-B-Gone. It is a simple remote that fits in the
palm of your hand. TV-B-Gone has one button, a power button. Point
it at nearly any television set, and you can turn the thing off.
(You can also turn the TV back on at the moment you're leaving
the room.) For more information, go to www.tvbgone.com.
In a way, the TVs
that blare at us wherever we go are worse than the telescreen
in "1984," George Orwell's novel about totalitarian
communism. In "1984," Big Brother may have been watching
you, but you didn't have to watch him all day long.
The last straw for
me was sitting over a cup of cappuccino at some cafe where the
television never took a break. It was fixed on a news channel
that played the same footage of a forest fire over and over again.
In this world of
TiVo, Netflix and video iPods, we can supposedly watch exactly
what we want, when we want it. That's civilization. But the society
that lets television hijack public spaces -- that's tyranny. Television
should always be our servant, never our master.
I fear it may be
too late to save ourselves.
Copyright
2005 Creators Syndicate
