Take the challenge: no TV for a week
By Frazier Moore
Associated Press
Soon the TV networks will be airing retrospectives like never before.
NBC is spotlighting two different 10th anniversaries and throwing itself a diamond jubilee. CBS has a pair of golden anniversary specials. ABC has "Laverne & Shirley Together Again" to mark that sitcom's, er, twice-a-baker's-dozenth year.
You can catch it all. Or, instead, you can observe a different kind of anniversary today through Sunday: The eighth annual TV-Turnoff Week.
Click! The whole family is invited to make a clean break from the tube, whose temptations would otherwise snare adults an average of more than 28 hours that week and children 21 hours.
"TV watching is the default setting for many people," says Frank Vespe, executive director of the nonprofit Washington, D.C.-based TV-Turnoff Network.
Vespe, who averages a half-hour of viewing a week, knows TV-Turnoff Week won't send the Nielsens into a swoon or bring broadcasters to their knees.
"TV isn't going away and we're not saying that it should," he says. "But if we can get people to the point where they're making a conscious choice to watch when they watch, and to spend more time doing other things, we will have made a difference."
Today, start steeling yourself for seven days without "Oprah," "Law & Order" or "The Osbournes." At worse, you'll be testing the truth of that old adage, "Absence makes the heart grow fonder."
But TV-Turnoff Week proposes you'll find better things to do than pine for television. And you can recruit other TV abstainers to do those things with.
On the TV-Turnoff Network's Web site, you'll find tips on how to rally children and fellow adults. The group estimates 6 million pulled the plug last year and says it signed 15,000 organizers for Turnoff '02.
The Web site also furnishes plenty of arguments for re-examining your leisure time priorities — and your kids'. (A good reason to start with: The connection between obesity and TV watching drawn by then-Surgeon General David Satcher as he endorsed last year's TV-Turnoff Week.)
There are lots of alternative activities with which you can fill your TV cooling-off period. The Web site lists 101 suggestions, including baking, learning yoga, tending the garden and reading a book.
The objective is to occupy yourself exclusively with something other than TV, Web-surfing and video games — what Vespe calls "passive-screen entertainment."
"TV is easy, it doesn't demand anything of you," he says. "Every worthwhile activity in the world is difficult in some measure and requires a conscious effort."
The issue isn't watching "better" television, or choosing "Masterpiece Theatre" over "WWF Smackdown!" Instead, the TV-Turnoff Network contends Americans' lives increasingly are identified with the media they consume.
"To an unprecedented degree, the torrent of images, songs and stories streaming (from the media) has become our familiar world," writes Todd Gitlin (who is on the TV-Turnoff Network board of advisers) in his recent book "Media Unlimited."
"In a society that fancies itself the freest ever," he declares, "spending time with communications machinery is the main use to which we have put our freedom."
TV-Turnoff Week is a way to fully reappropriate that freedom, if only for a seven-day experiment. In this media flood, the best way to glimpse an alternative state may be to poke your head above the surface.
So consider TV-Turnoff Week a call for TV, video-game and computer habitues to spend a few days re-engaging with real life.
A lot to ask of this couch potato nation?
"It's a pretty uphill battle we're fighting," Vespe says. "But I think more and more people know of us and what we do."
One clue: The fate of recent legislation to encourage Virginia families to give their televisions a week's rest. In February the measure was killed by a state Senate committee whose 15 members, as The Washington Post reported, had been lobbied by the cable and broadcast TV industry.
"Sure, the industry can defeat that resolution," Vespe says. "But for them to spend the money and resources to lobby against it — well, I think that was nice validation that we're making some noise, we're making some progress."
