Comments on: Kill your television

By: Do Black Men Prefer White Women? « The World According to Xenocrates

Do Black Men Prefer White Women? « The World According to Xenocrates — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 23:00:29 +0000

[...] I would say that one shouldn’t believe everything seen on TV. So do yourselves a favour: Kill your television. It will free you of 9/10ths of the rubbish that is commonly propagated in western civilization. It [...]

By: Alamanach

Alamanach — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 13:24:49 +0000

Cheesy! So nice of you to drop in. In my own view (and you’re welcome to disagree), the internet is a much healthier use of one’s time than TV. Obviously, there’s plenty of drek on the internet too, but then there’s also the interactive factor. The internet pushes ideas on us, but it also lets us push back. Go read the debates that xenlogic gets into in the comments sections on his blog, and you’ll see what I mean. The internet encourages us to think.

Also, the internet is not so culturally monolithic as TV. Take, for example, this very reply that I’m writing. I’m an American in Afghanistan writing to a Filipino in Singapore about a Jamaican man’s blog while Scotish banjo music is playing. TV can’t easily combine such disparate elements, but on the internet it’s the most natural thing in the world. The internet allows for a much broader range of experiences.

By: cheesyskepticism

cheesyskepticism — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 12:52:42 +0000

Hi Sir, I like this expository post. I agree wholeheartedly with the insights here. Very informative and very convincing. For me and my contemporaries, it’s not so much about the TV but the internet. And it sure does have the same effect. I’ll surely keep my laptop away, or probably terminate my internet connection

By: Alamanach

Alamanach — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 10:47:00 +0000

I originally lost my TV more or less by accident. I had planned to replace it but never got around to doing so, and after a while I noticed I hadn’t been missing it. It was a pretty painless separation. So, you may find that it is not as hard as you expect.

By: Stewart

Stewart — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 06:20:38 +0000

Holy crap… I need to stop watching TV thats a brilliant post right there Al… Its going to be hard but I am willing to try. I need to gain back those 4 years!

As my brother always says though marketing is the creation of necessity and that is so true. I realize I have been watching TV and actually considering buying products which i’m sure i’ll never need… argh I feel stupider

By: Alamanach

Alamanach — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 03:20:43 +0000

“I’m going to add this to my on-going list of profound things to read on the internet for a future blog post.”

Cool! Thanks! Maybe I’ll actually get some visitors around here…

By: xenlogic

xenlogic — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 23:09:19 +0000

This is absolutely profound. Master ALamanach, I'm going to add this to my on-going list of profound things to read on the internet for a future blog post. This paragraph, was the most epic of the lot:

"For four and a half hours a day, every day, year after year, we are told not just what products to buy, but what problems to have. We are told what to desire. We are told what dreams to pursue. We are told who we are by people we have never met. Four and half hours a day, every day, for our entire lives. I do not wish to be melodramatic, but this is brainwashing."

Allow me pause to say just this: WAOW. I think I just added 4 points to my IQ. Thank you sir. This is a valuable contribution to the continuity of human intelligence. Technically, Television is obsolete. TiVO is redundant (now there's streaming on-demand media and YouTube). Every news network now offers its news streaming live via the internet. Even if one were a drama junkie, you can get every episode of every television program online to download for free - LEGALLY. That automatically makes watching television altogether redundant. The only thing that would keep a TV necessary is for using it to view media via DVD/BluRay. When computers start shipping with BluRay players as a standard component, that too will become redundant.

By: Alamanach

Alamanach — Sun, 18 Jan 2009 01:23:02 +0000

In most cases, no. First of all, it takes very little time to scan the headlines of a newspaper or internet news source. Secondly, TV does not allow us to skip irrelevant content, so time wasted on useless TV news stories is not similarly wasted with a newspaper or website. If someone actually spent as much time reading the news on the internet as he would otherwise spend in front of a TV, he would be much more richly informed about the topics that are relevant to him.

Is this lost productivity? Personally, I would not count it as such; there is a need to be informed about the world, and the internet and newspapers are a far more efficient conduit of such information than television. At worst, spending as much time reading internet news as one would watching TV news might be news overkill, but at least such a person would be genuinely well-informed.

By: Dave Collymore

Dave Collymore — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 05:30:28 +0000

I scarcely watch TV and when I say scarcely I mean like once per week or there about… and sometimes even less… But the main reason is because the Tv programs in Japan are not very interesting plus I dont fully understand what the people are saying… However, I spend too much time on the Internet doing all manner of things from blogging, to reading news to chatting to friends all over the world… But dont you think that reading the news on the internet or even in the newspaper still works out to some amount of years of lost productivity as well, just like the TV, even though there is more fullsome information on the internet etc ???