Pulling the Plug

"Did you see this?" I ask Jess. She's sitting across from me at the kitchen table. We're engaging in a rare moment of weekend peace. The kids are watching "Danger Rangers," their lips hanging slack from chewing mouths on the couch. Fresh coffee. Newspaper. Bagels.

"Nine percent of the people in this survey watch SIX hours of TV a day!" I hand her the paper, which she scans, reading ahead of where I'd stopped in shock.

"Yeah, but 19 percent say they use the net that much. Who the heck spends 6 hours a day on the net?" The mockery in her voice is cutting and sharp.

"You wound me madam," I reply, snatching the paper from her. "That's it. We're getting rid of the thing."

"The net?" She's just making fun of me now. Laughing, I throw my napkin at her.

"No not the net. What do you think I am? Crazy? No, the TV!"

According to the survey in question, released by IBM in August, internet-hours are starting to, or already have overtaken TV-hours. Twice as many people in the sample cross that six hour near-addiction line when it comes to the web vs. the TV. And this is just for personal stuff, not for work.

Which part of this you find shocking and disturbing really depends on the kind of person you are. My wife's question is a fair one - what do I do on the net all day. The answer is "a lot more than I can do on TV." My connection to the Internet is effectively perpetual. Certainly during any hour I consider "work" I am connected. E-mail updates constantly. Instant Messaging is pinging off and on. Skype calls come in. Internet-radio plays in the background (and if not, iTunes is feeding last.fm my listening habits). This before I open up a web browser and surf, research, or just procrastinate, and the connections are essentially identical to my phone if I am forced to leave the basement.

The distinction between this work-time and my play-time is nebula-thin. If I fire up the 360, it is of course connected as well, and the screens to my left and right maintain their constant connections to media while my fingers and attention are straight ahead. And this play-time is usually work-time in disguise. I can quite often compose a particularly useful piece of text in my head while playing something relatively unintellectual (Peggle anyone?)

In both cases, work and play, what drives the experience is self-selection, immediacy, and multi-tasking. To some extent these things can be true of TV as well - between changing channels, Tivo, and my laptop, watching TV is an experience not dissimilar. But there's an intensity and involvement in consuming net-media that simply isn't replaced by the coax/cable-box pair.

---

"Well, what would we be giving up really?" she asks. My wife will humor me on almost topic for 10 minutes, so I can judge nothing from this response.

"Cable. We call Time Warner, cancel, and take the box back. We save about 80 bucks a month." Pulling the money card is a cheap trick. She's a flat out sucker for saving money. Still, she looks skeptical as she leaves her chair to get herself another cup of coffee.

"It's like the coffee really," I continue, as she puts another little K-Cup in the on-demand coffee maker. "Almost anything we really want to watch - Lost, Battlestar, Heroes - they're all available on demand on the web. At least they were last year."

Last fall our PVR computer started acting up, and for a month or two we were forced to either watch TV live, or find our favorite shows on the web. It was surprisingly easy, and while we could have played them through the computer hooked to the big TV, what we actually did was snuggle on the couch watching shows on her laptop. It was a good thing. It felt like we were watching a play. I felt far more connected than when we were staring out into space, each with our laptops open, half-paying attention to the show, much less each other.

She quickly sussed out the root problem.

"Really it's about the kids. We're not going to go hunting for Hannah Montana on the Internet for her to watch on Sunday mornings."

Like most parents, I imagine, we let our kids watch TV not out of any delusional belief that the stuff is good for them, but because it's easier than parenting. I say this as someone who is quite confident of who I am as a parent, but I'm also not in so much denial that I could call kids TV anything more than the culturally sanctioned nipple-full-of-coke it is. More often than I'd care to admit, I have stumbled down the stairs on a weekend morning, children in tow, to turn on the TV.

Sunday mornings sleeping in. It's a hard thing to give up on purpose. But I steel myself. "Nope," I admit. "But is that a bad thing? That our kids watch less TV?" Yet another cheap shot. In the Guiness book of of rhetorical questions "should you're kids watch more TV?" is way up there.

She goes for the kill.

"What about football?"

Boom, headshot.

There really is no replacement for watching football on a Sunday afternoon or a Monday night. But as we've aged, we watch less and less. Most of our TV viewing has been time shifted for nearly a decade, and sports just isn't the same on delay.

"Well, so we make dates to go watch big games at sports bars." This is actually a selling point. My wife digs the road trip to the big sports bar an hour away. You sit in a booth for 3 hours drinking margaritas and yelling at the TV while people bring you wings and ice cream. It doesn't suck.

"OK let's do it. Give me the box." This is the kind of people we are. We noodle on things, sometimes for minutes, sometimes for years. But when we decide to do something, it's always instant. We make decisions about buying houses nearly as quickly.

Ten minutes later she's driving to the cable office with our fancy HD Cable PVR box on the passenger seat, and we have no cable in the house.

---

For me, life without cable has almost no impact, because of gaming. When I enter the headspace where my wife wants to flop down on the couch, I want to flop down and play a game. With some couples that might seem distancing, but we both work from home. We see each other off and on all day. We can get to the gym together, go for a walk, go to lunch. So "me time" in the evenings is natural for us.

About a year ago, I made a decision to stop watching crime TV. The distinction between being a passive voyeur to violence and depravity vs. enacting it myself through a game is, admittedly, a bizarre one to make. But I just found myself sitting on the couch one night thinking "I should be doing something." And in a very real way, gaming is doing something. I make conscious decisions. I interact with far more intensity than just flipping channels.

But my TV knows what I'm doing. The first night without cable just happened to coincide with my acquisition of Metroid Prime 3. Without cable to monopolize the big-TV, my wife sat on the couch next to me, pointing out things I missed, suggesting strategies, laughing at the repetitive voice acting.

And then my Wii fried. It let out a Japanese scream and froze, never to reboot again.

But I'm not giving in. The cable stays off.

Comments

There will be a few accidental guilty pleasures I'll miss. A random episode of Dirty Jobs never fails to entertain.

BlackSheep wrote:
Gorilla.800.lbs wrote:

Now that you have no TV, try removing beer as well, and see just what happens.

What kind of life is that?

"No TV and no beer make booty go something something"

Wife: "Crazy?"

"DON"T MIND IF I DO!"

http://tv.ign.com/articles/742/74268...

My husband and I actively decided, when we married a little over eleven years ago, that we wouldn't have a TV. He felt too much the risk of becoming addicted to something that was (in many cases) just plain bad, and both of us have enough hobbies that we figured we'd never miss it. And we don't.

We did have to purchase a TV back in February when we decided that a Wii was in the works. But it's not hooked up to *anything* other than the little white box.

If I really want to watch silly TV, I need go no farther than YouTube.

I've had cable on and off for a few years now. When I have it, I barely use it: My girlfriend watches Canada AM in the morning (For which I relentlessly mock her) which is the extent of her viewing. I refuse to watch shows with commercials that are otherwise available on DVD or on the web: For every 43 minutes of viewing I spend watching a commercial free show, another person spends a full hour, with 17 minutes of commercials. Sorry, I'd rather wait for the DVD than spend my free time watching commercials.

The thing that always brings me back to cable is, unfortunately, Hockey.
Apart from Saturday Nights, Cable is a requisite for hockey viewing, and even then, basic cable isn't enough: I have to pay for the extra channels. I seriously wish there was a way for me to only get three channels and nothing else, instead of spending 40$ a month for a bunch of channels I don't want or use.
Unfortunately, a life without readily accessible hockey is just...empty.
So, I normally cancel my cable over the summer and renew it, oh, right about now.

I can't wait until hockey becomes readily available over the net, or more a-la-carte cable packages become widespread. Until that day, the evil empire that is rogers will grudgingly soon be receiving my hard earned cash once again.

DUDE!

I thought you were yanking my chain when you told me you dumped your cable! What about Bob the Builder? What about Thomas?

We lived without it back in Louisiana when I could get signals over the air (for weather reports and whatnot). We needed to stay abreast on hurricane activity and other weather related information we could not reliably get on line at the time.

Now that we're out in 100 miles from nothing Wyoming, I could not give up cable. No over the air signals -- no other weather source if the net goes down. If not for that, though, it'd be out of the house.

What a timely coincidence for your article, Rabbit. Last week a decent storm blew in the area and knocked my Directv dish off course. Now, since I had no idea what direction it was facing in the first place I called them to get somebody over and reposition it. I haven't missed watching the television at all these past few days, and am thinking about calling to terminate service. Small world, eh?

I have Cable at my place but honestly the cable company has never unhooked it since I moved in and I am not inclined to call them to get ride of it

I barely watch it plus if it's a show I really want I will download it

once and a while I will turn on cable to see what's on but than I might just throw my 360 on or maybe turn it to A&E, Discovery or History sometimes maybe TSN or Sportsnet but I don't really care about the cable, I have the Internet

Great Article though

When I moved into my apt with my roommate 15 months ago we decided we didn't need cable but we definitely needed cable internet. Haven't second-guessed that decision once. About 8 months ago we got rabbit ears for the television and end up watching Seinfeld or the Simpsons at dinnertime around once a week.
It's nice.
When I went to visit my parents I still knew how to work the remotes but I had no idea what the tv schedule was or where the channels were (they seem to get shuffled?) I turned on the tv a few times out of habit and started flipping, but nothing ever grabbed me.

I am the exact thing thing that Network TV executives fear - prime demographic (18-35 year old male) who has no interest in TV and advertisers can't get to me that way.

I'm giving it to the man by not giving him anything.
It's nice.

It's ironic that so many people are ditching TV, just when TV is starting to be worth watching. There's still plenty of "idiot box" content out there (hello, reality TV!), but it's remarkable how much more sophisticated and demanding of their audience that the average TV drama has become in the past 10-20 years. You go back and look at some of the things that were on prime-time TV in the past, and they would simply be un-airable today. Our standards on the whole have gone up, way up.

I'm careful not to throw around the term "intelligent", but there's more programming catering to the non-idiot on TV now than ever before. I actually watch some TV now, whereas in the past 20+ years before the last few, I never watched a TV series weekly. DVRs help in this regard too.

(Of course, as has been pointed out, a lot of the shows one would want to watch are available without subscribing to cable/satellite TV - get 'em online, or on DVD, etc)

Well played sir, well played.

My apartment actually offers free basic cable, so what the hell...!

When I moved I priced TV services and decided none of them were worth the money to me. So I got all ready to give up TV forever, didn't care much, after all I only watched Adult Swim and discovery channel...

My Association Fees include basic cable.

*sigh*

If only we could get ala carte so I could get the few channels I watched.

Thank you Rabbit. I presented this missive to my wife to read. Her completely unexpected response? "Wow!! Good for them! Wanna try it?"

While she will also tolerate any random weirdness I may spew forth for a few minutes, I think she's actually serious.

You go Codger!

XLCS wrote:

Well played sir, well played.

My apartment actually offers free basic cable, so what the hell...!

Same here. Big city livin' FTW.

If I would just bite the bullet and make a media PC as an entertainment center main piece then I could actually subscribe to and download certain shows from internet services onto it automatically and watch them just like a TIVO.

Article on various methods to watch TV on the internet. A specific Resource to watch specific things on TV. And then there are also services or applications that will automatically download or suck down torrents scheduled at certain times or when they become available also RSS feeds. So honestly it is very possible to watch all your shows on the internet and not get cable at all. The only thing you can't do is actually watch sports. At least not yet.

It's a pretty realistic alternative for those that really want to do this.

I'm of the opposite mind as this is a great time for tv. DirecTV's new HD channels are coming any day now. Video on demand is now available. Scheduling from their website for your DVR is almost here. I see this as good because I can watch things on my terms and cut out the commercials to have more time.

Edwin wrote:

I'm of the opposite mind as this is a great time for tv. DirecTV's new HD channels are coming any day now. Video on demand is now available. Scheduling from their website for your DVR is almost here. I see this as good because I can watch things on my terms and cut out the commercials to have more time.

I'm pretty sure Dish and DTV already have HD channels included. All in all though, I'd prefer a la carte TV over a full package. I'd pay half as much for 1/4 or less channels.

rabbit wrote:

There really is no replacement for watching football on a Sunday afternoon or a Monday night.

There is actually. It's called watching Hockey.

AnimeJ wrote:
Edwin wrote:

I'm of the opposite mind as this is a great time for tv. DirecTV's new HD channels are coming any day now. Video on demand is now available. Scheduling from their website for your DVR is almost here. I see this as good because I can watch things on my terms and cut out the commercials to have more time.

I'm pretty sure Dish and DTV already have HD channels included. All in all though, I'd prefer a la carte TV over a full package. I'd pay half as much for 1/4 or less channels.

Agreed. Out of the 677 channels I have available to me I filter all except about 60 of them on my DVR. Even then I only watch a dozen of them on my DVR.