Technology Marches On

When I was in elementary school, I remember there were a few years where the school "advertised", for lack of a better word, a special event kids were encouraged to take part in. This event consisted of going an entire week without watching television. Looking it up, I've found that it's still being practiced - it's a week in April called "TV Turnoff Week".

The idea behind TV Turnoff Week is simple: If kids don't have television, they'll be more active, or play together, or read, or something else conceived as better than television. But the problem with technology is that it's always changing, and television does not have anywhere near the pull now it did in the nineties - and so, turning it off for a week makes far less of an impact.

As a child, my thoughts of TV Turnoff Week were simple: I felt it was extreme, and believed it unnecessary. I never participated. I was a pretty well-rounded kid (albeit solitary aside from my brother) - sure, I watched Nickelodeon, Cartoon Network, and occasionally the Disney Channel, but I had other pursuits. I played outside. I doodled. I was an avid reader. Toys and video games and coloring books all occupied niches of my time. I didn't feel that television dominated my life enough to be a horrible problem I had to evict - and at the same time, I dearly enjoyed my regular shows and didn't want to miss out on them.

Flash-forward to today. As it turns out, I've been participating in TV Turnoff Week for at least two years now. Back in 2009, after going back and forth between several cable plans, my family made the decision to drop all television. Although we still have four televisions in the house, not a single one is used for actually watching television shows. Two of them have VCRs hooked up to them. All four have a video game system connected. None receive any cable or over-the-air channels. This is what we use television sets for now, and I couldn't be happier with it. In the past, we had the television on for most of the day as background noise, and as I grew older and found fewer and fewer shows I cared about watching, I didn't enjoy it. But now? No commercials, no blaring news or reality shows, and no having to listen to dramatic weigh-in scenes on The Biggest Loser or studio applause on Wheel of Fortune when I'm trying to sleep.

So what happened? We had VCRs and video games in the nineties, and I loved TV then. Why do I no longer care about it? The answer's right in front of you. The Internet absolutely destroys television in terms of user enjoyment, real-world application, practicality, and entertainment value. It's "on-demand" - I don't have to wait till 8 PM to access my favorite websites. They (generally) aren't interrupted by loud, unwanted ads. And if you must have something to watch, there's plenty for free thanks to places like YouTube and Crackle. As a result, the Internet has completely replaced television as one of my entertainment sources, and does things TV could never do. This is why I was so enthusiastic when joining this week's protests against Internet censorship - we can't afford to lose something this valuable.

And don't expect an "Internet Turnoff Week", either - thanks to online schooling, e-textbooks, scholarly articles, social networking and Wikipedia, the Internet and computers in general have proven to be useful in academia as well. Technology marches on, and I'm always interested to see how it develops and changes the world next.