Brandon Moon

I remember one evening as a kid when my Dad came upstairs from our TV room. Earlier, my siblings had been watching a movie that, for whatever reason, they weren’t supposed to be watching. I think they had been told to go to bed, or something like that. Anyhow, he came upstairs with a huge grin on his face, carrying the plug to the TV. Just the plug. He had literally cut it off as a way of punishing us for watching too much TV. My sister cried. A lot.

Though it may not have seemed so at the time, it was probably one of the best things he could have done for us. Lucky (or maybe unlucky) for us, my Dad is an electrical engineer. He rigged up our TV’s power cord to a lock and key. When the key was in, the TV worked; when the key was out, the TV wouldn’t even turn on. It was a brilliant way for him to control how much TV we watched as a family without cutting us off completely. It taught me that TV is something to be controlled, not something we should let control us.

TV can be sort of like a drug to us. It rewards us in the short-term, but leaves us with long-term regrets. It can be addictive. It can lead to unhappiness. “OK,” you say, “this isn’t a big surprise. I’ve known this for a while.” True, but what I find interesting is that it doesn’t actually change our habits much. Even more interesting, though, is that we’ve had TV since 1927, and we’re only just discovering all the social and personal effects.

That kind of scares me.

Why?

Because the Internet is way more prevalent in our lives now, and we’ve only had it for about 30 years. How is it affecting us? How is social networking affecting us, like Facebook and Twitter? We can already see how it’s pulling us apart, and yet we do little to stop it.

Here’s a great article about how TV gives us a feeling of vicarious friendship through watching unrealistic images of groups of friends that spend all their time together. We want deep social interaction, but we turn to cheap imitations of this through Facebook and TV:

This decline in real friendships may account in part for the dramatic rise of virtual friendships like those on social-networking sites where being “friended” is less a sign of personal engagement than a quantitative measure of how many people your life has brushed and how many names you can collect, but this is friendship lite. Facebook, in fact, only underscores how much traditional friendship — friendship in which you meet, talk and share — has become an anachronism and how much being “friended” is an ironic term.

Perhaps we should take the advice of the first article and go back to reading books. They’re one of the few things untouched by the media and advertising — for a little while longer, at least.