Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Rejecting Television, published by Declan Molony on April 23, 2024 on LessWrong.
I didn't use to be, but now I'm part of the
2% of
U.S. households without a television. With its near ubiquity, why reject this technology?
The Beginning of my Disillusionment
Neil Postman's book Amusing Ourselves to Death radically changed my perspective on television and its place in our culture. Here's one illuminating passage:
We are no longer fascinated or perplexed by [TV's] machinery. We do not tell stories of its wonders. We do not confine our TV sets to special rooms. We do not doubt the reality of what we see on TV [and] are largely unaware of the special angle of vision it affords. Even the question of how television affects us has receded into the background. The question itself may strike some of us as strange, as if one were to ask how having ears and eyes affects us.
[In the 1960s], the question "Does television shape culture or merely reflect it?" held considerable interest for scholars and social critics. The question has largely disappeared as television has gradually become our culture. This means that we rarely talk about television, only what is on television - that is, about its content.
Postman wrote this in 1985 and unmasked the
gorilla in the room - a culture that has acquiesced to the institution of television. Having grown up with one in my family home since birth, I took its presence for granted. I didn't question it anymore than I might have questioned any other utility such as running water or electricity. So who would be crazy enough in the 21st century to forego television?
A Man who was Crazy Enough
One day while exploring YouTube, I came across an obscure 2003
interview with author David Foster Wallace.
Interviewer: "Do you watch TV?"
Wallace: "I don't have TV because if I have a TV, I will watch it all the time. So there is my little confession about how strong I am at resisting stuff."
He elaborates further in the interview
here:
"One of the reasons I can't own a TV is…I've become convinced there's something really good on another channel and that I'm missing it. So instead of watching, I'm scanning anxiously back and forth. Now all you have to do is [motions clicking a remote] - you don't even have to get up now to change [the channel]! That's when we were screwed."
Wallace said this twenty years ago. And while
younger generations aren't watching cable television as much, they are instead watching YouTube and TikTok which are proxies; you can just as easily change the 'channel' by skipping to a different video. (For the remainder of this post I'll use the word 'television' to also refer to these types of video content).
But maybe Wallace was just a weak-willed person? Why should I abstain? I would need a mountain of evidence to quit watching television - an activity I had been engaging in for the better part of two decades.
A Mountain of Evidence
Had I been looking, I would have seen it all around me: the late nights of sacrificing sleep for "just one more episode", the YouTube rabbit holes that started in the name of learning that inevitably ended in brain-rotting videos, and the ever-increasing number of porn videos I needed to stimulate my tired dopamine receptors that had been bludgeoned by years of binging. But, of course, this is just anecdotal evidence. For my skeptical mind I would need more.
And that evidence came in the form of author Deirdre Barrett's book Supernormal Stimuli: How Primal Urges Overran Their Evolutionary Purpose. She writes "The most sinister aspect of TV lies in the medium itself. There's a growing body of research on what it does to our brain." Television, she explains, activates the orienting response.
Orienting Response: the basic instinct to pay attention to any sudden or novel stimulus such as movement or sound. It evo...

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