Hey… This is a box! We’ve been watching a box!

Photo: Hana Kirana (Wikicommons)

Every night, millions of people become slack-jawed, almost drooling, with glassy blank eyes and a thousand-yard stare. Attack of the Bodysnatchers? No, it’s just prime-time TV. (Originally published in impulse May 2008).

Have you ever been in conversation with someone and in an attempt to describe something they say ‘…And it was just like a scene from the Sopranos!’? As if there was no other reference that could better convey the event? As if television was the best way to experience life?

The average Scot aged over four will watch 27.9 hours of television a week. If you grow up with a television in your house, this means you will spend around ten years of your life staring motionless at a screen, without adding in any time spent at a computer.

Walk into most homes with a television set and it takes centre stage in whatever room it’s in, with all other furniture arranged around it. We also organize our daily routines around it, watching it at set times. TV demands our complete frozen attention, which the media industry then sells on to advertisers. The filmmaker Godard suggested that viewers should be paid for watching considering the labour time involved and the money created from them.

TV isn’t a meeting place to exchange ideas and thoughts, but a barrage of one-way communication. If you disagree with something, there is no chance to go back and reconsider it. Viewers become lulled into uncritical consumption, passive and still. Your only right is the right to turn the TV off.