When the Screen Goes Blank: The Good We Might do if We Turned Off Our Sets | Hacker News Reader

When the Screen Goes Blank: The Good We Might do if We Turned Off Our Sets

nytimes.com

15 pointsfleaflicker15 comments

Most of the recent criticisms of TV that I've seen don't spend much time recognizing that the human brain needs downtime. As a way to veg out after 12 hours of programming, TV isn't any worse than reading a trashy novel or whatnot. I think the real question is, is there something about bad TV that changes our brain?

That is, is it not just a break from work? Are we actively making our brains more demanding of a break? In my limited experience, TV does seem to "rot" my brain. The more I watch, the fewer hours I can spend each day doing productive tasks.

Thus, my goal is to find an activity that allows me to veg out as effectively as TV while improving, or at least not inhibiting, my mental acuity. One obvious example is exercise. Of course, as any regular weightlifter or long distance runner can tell you, exercise can be rather addicting itself!

I've found Hulu to be an increasingly effective TV-replacement. TV gives a temptation to just sit and watch whatever comes up with no end in sight. It's a lot like going to one of the higher-traffic Reddits. It's a ton of least-common-denominator crap that offends no one significantly and interests everyone marginally. On Hulu, I zero in on what I want to watch, I watch it, then I do something else.

Same here. The ability to resume at any later time also makes it an attractive substitute.

Now they just need to get more shows :\

Time not watching TV != time doing something productive, much less efficiently. Ever heard of burn-out?

But I'm sure we all knew this. Anyone read the book, and can comment on its contents?

All that said, I have no TV, except for one I occasionally hook up for movies with friends (my computer screens / speakers are unwieldy). I don't miss it, and I've read a ton more without it (including frightening amounts of time here.). I'm certainly more productive without it.

> Time not watching TV != time doing something productive, much less efficiently. Ever heard of burn-out?

There is useful work which requires very little mental energy or effort - effectively zero.

Since the article mentions it, let's take Wikipedia. Perhaps copyediting is too difficult. Never mind, you can just fix a few dozen or hundred disambiguations. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Disambigu...) Currently too difficult for computers to do reliably, but very easy for a human, and useful (if not as useful as referencing {{fact}}s, say).

Menial things may not require mental energy or effort, but they certainly do cost.

Anyone read the book, and can comment on its contents?

Here's a conference talk-sized approximation from Shirky himself: http://www.shirky.com/herecomeseverybody/2008/04/looking-for...

So the May 1st edition of the Economist this year had a fantastic special report on the future of television. Although I agree it can be a huge time waste, I think live TV will continue to play an important role in media consumption going forward. A lot of the TV I continue to watch and enjoy is typically best when seen live--World Cup, college football, etc. Although there is a large bias towards sporting events, I think this phenomenon exists even with series (e.g. even with the rise in ownership of DVR's, many people still watch their favorite shows live).

http://www.economist.com/specialreports/specialreportslist.c...

The main problem with tv is not the fact that a person watches video, although I think the video medium is one that tends to manipulative because it combines a lot of emotional elements. The problem is the linearity of television. You turn it on, something is on the television, and you watch it if you want, or turn to another channel.

You hear it in the language, you watch tv, not watch Law and Order, or watch Friends (with some exceptions for really popular shows like Lost) Where Hulu/Netflix/DVR/Dvds come in is that they direct the watching experience. You choose to watch something, making it much less of a block of time everyday.

Part of what Shirky's book, Cognitive Surplus, which was mentioned in the article, is that the cost of organizing people has gotten much less since the invention of the Internet. People now do things besides television watching, like Etsy, or discuss politics, or having communities of artists, because doing those things is more rewarding that television, and about as easy to set up as watching television. Note all of the startup advice hear on Hacker News.

I agree with the author a little in the end, that the activities won't always be positive. The same abilities that allow us to coordinate disaster relief funding from the home also all pro-anorexia support groups to flourish. I also think the reviewer missed one of the better points in the book, that the difficult part will be getting people to do something more valuable than television. It's great to create, but most people will create lolcatz pictures, which isn't that much better than television.

Overall, pretty good book at describing the Internet phenom of online groups being able to do a whole lot given the right circumstances. I imagine if Paul Graham was ever in any type of trouble, the denizens of Hacker News would probably turn out in a similar fashion to some of the examples given in the book.

It's an interesting criticism, because while I don't much like TV these days, I feel that, in a lot of ways, for me the internet is a lot more dangerous than TV ever was. At least traditionally, there were only so many TV stations, and you could only watch them so long before getting bored. The internet will waste essentially infinite amounts of your time, though. Granted, I do things he sees as useful, like edit Wikipedia (I have like 30k edits). But I'm not sure if the shift in medium necessarily implies any sort of improvement in utilization of cognitive resources. We've still got YouTube, Facebook, Reddit, and all manner of time-wasting going on here.

Maybe, but I think internet time wasting is a lot less toxic than TV time wasting. For me the main differences are:

tv channel-surfing is a variable-rewards skinner box (more so than internet)

tv has an essentially higher cost to stop watching (getting up from your couch is a lot harder than alt+tabbing back to emacs), and due to the immersive quality of video it is also harder to multi-task with useful stuff, like alternating between reading HN and an academic paper

due to the rigidity of tv programming, it has an incentive for you to just stay where you are (if a show you like starts in 10 minutes you're unlikely to do anything useful in these 10min) and for you to structure your life around it (staying up late to watch a late show, for example, means you're probably going to look for thing to watch on tv before that late show you wanted to watch)

tv creates a social illusion (at least here in brazil almost everybody knows tv-related inside jokes and comments, and not watching tv means being left out of these conversations)

tv programming comes in very long and rigid quanta of time (just like WoW playing; half an hour easily goes by without anything significant happening), unlike reading stuff on the internet or watching 5min-long youtube videos

tv tends to be (although this can be said to be changing) more about the tv experience (sit on couch, relax, watch "interesting", beautiful people doing "interesting" things in a funny way) and less about the specific content, while the internet is a lot more about the content, so there's a higher chance you can get something out of it

tv is completely passive, no comments allowed.

tv has an essentially higher cost to stop watching (getting up from your couch is a lot harder than alt+tabbing back to emacs)

On the other hand, it's physically more difficult to come back to the TV once you've gone away.

My wife and I stopped watching television almost a year ago. We do watch one or two movies a week still, but not regular TV.

When we first tell people we don't watch TV anymore the general reaction is "That's great, I wish I could do that."

It does periodically get a little awkward sometimes. The biggest time it gets awkward is when our friends that know we don't watch TV ask us things like "hey, did you see the trailer for that new movie?" or "Hey, did you see this story on the news last night?" No, we don't watch TV, we don't see very many movie trailers, just what is on the DVD before the movie we rented, and those are usually for older movies. We don't watch the local news (we do read local news though.)

I keep somewhat up to date with news via this site, and some from NPR. Between the two, everything major and most I'm likely to care about is covered, and I feel no great loss at not knowing that there was a 12 car pileup in Kansas, nor do I lament wading through the websites / 45 minute piece covering it to get to anything remotely important.

My cable box went back to Comcast 2 months ago. Don't miss it at all.

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