Break the Grip

To break the grip that too much information has on you, I suggest the following:

* When you get home, practice sitting in your TV room for 30 minutes without the TV on.

* Skip reading the newspaper, anytime you feel like it.

* In general, be more selective in what you decide to read. Just because there is an abundance of interesting articles to read, doesn't mean you have to read them.

We're all taking in more information than we can expect to absorb. You can only remember--and act upon--so much anyway; so, be selective!

The Peek-a-Boo World

Professor Neil Postman in his 1985 landmark book Amusing Ourselves to Death offers a brilliant portrait of how television consistently offers us a false view of reality. Here is an excerpt from the start of Chapter 5, "The Peek-a-Boo World":

"Television has become, so to speak, the background radiation of the social and intellectual universe, the all-but-imperceptible residue of the electronic big bang of a century past, so familiar and so thoroughly integrated with American culture that we no longer hear its faint hissing in the background or see the flickering grey light. This, in turn, means that its epistemology goes largely unnoticed. And the peek-a-boo world it has constructed around us no longer seems even strange."

"There is no more disturbing consequence of the electronic and graphic revolution than this: that the world as given to us through television seems natural, not bizarre. For the loss of the sense of the strange is a sign of adjustment, and the extent to which we have adjusted is a measure of the extent to which we have changed. Our culture's adjustment to the epistemology of television is by now almost complete; we have so thoroughly accepted its definitions of truth, knowledge and reality that irrelevance seems to us to be filled with import, and incoherence seems eminently sane."

"It is my object in the rest of this book to make the epistemology of television visible again. I will try to demonstrate by concrete example... that television's conversations promote incoherence and triviality... and that television speaks in only one persistent voice — the voice of entertainment. Beyond that, I will try to demonstrate that to enter the great television conversation, one American cultural institution after another is learning to speak its terms."

"Television, in other words, is transforming our culture into one vast arena for show business. It is entirely possible, of course, that in the end we shall find that delightful, and decide we like it just fine. This is exactly what Aldous Huxley feared was coming, fifty years ago."

Way Too Many TVs

NEW YORK (AP) -- The average American home now has more television sets than people. That threshold was crossed within the past two years, according to Nielsen Media Research. There are 2.73 TV sets in the typical home and 2.55 people, the researchers said.

Half of American homes have three or more TVs, and only 19 percent have just one, Nielsen said. In 1975, 57 percent of homes had only a single set and 11 percent had three or more, the company said.

Ads Now Saturate TV Shows

Here’s a telling report from WaynesThisandThat.com on “How Much TV Commercial Length has Grown over the Years:

“We all accept commercials as a necessary evil because they pay for the shows we love to watch. But, how much is reasonable to accept? This question was answered for me while watching a 2004 episode of Star Trek Enterprise. The commercials came so often and lasted so long that is was almost impossible to maintain a sense of continuity with the show.

This situation got me wondering how much the percentage of time given to a show is lost to commercials has increased over the years. Thanks to the availability of video recordings of past shows, this was easy to determine. Scouring my video library I found shows ranging from 1964 to the present, 2004. Here's what I discovered:

* 1964 - 17.8 percent of the time devoted to commercials

* 1977 - 17.8 percent

* 1994 - 24.5 percent

* 2004 - 30.0 percent

These were all for main line shows aired during prime time hours. So, how did the show that kicked this little study off do? Would you believe that a full 35 percent of the air time given to Star Trek Enterprise in 2004 was sacrificed to commercials? It was. To make matters worse the end credits were pushed into the far right margin to make room for a side bar ad, the station logo was continually displayed in the lower right hand corner of the screen, and twice an annoying pop up ad appeared in the left hand corner of the screen during the show. Taking these into account the total effective commercial time was crowding 38 percent.