article: Surviving the
American Dream
by David Wann
co-author
of "Affluenza:
The All-Consuming Epidemic"
author of "The Zen of Gardening"
“They live, you watch!” taunts
a teaser-ad for Survivor, or one of its primetime offspring.
The implication
seems to be that ordinary viewers like you and I aren’t capable
of being survivors, only observers. “Just slump on the couch while
video gladiators grapple for a million bucks in prize money, and spin-offs.”
It feels like we’ve been voted off the island! We’d better start strutting some of our own stuff, quickly. A few years back, I challenged adult education Denver University students to be Survivors with a few off-the-wall extra credit challenges. Like backpacking all consumer materials used during the weeklong assignment -- minus those they recycled or composted -- everywhere they went. Or staying out of their cars for a full week, as they learned to ride their bikes again, formed strategic alliances, and made desperate deals. Think you could do it? Are you a Survivor?
Although many of these continuing education students were a little exhausted by the end of the week, their journals and presentations revealed a renewed sense of self-reliance. The most heroic students of all were the media fasters, whose TVs and other electronic toys remained strangely silent for a week. Each student missed 500 or more sexy, fast-paced commercials that week, and some didn’t know what to do with their hands without remotes in them. But they made it -- America’s real Survivors.
Jerry Mander, a senior fellow at Public Media Center, describes the nature of the challenge they overcame, in an article for Utne Reader titled ‘Unplug Your Brain.’ “In the U.S., television is the main thing people do. It’s replaced community life, family life, and culture. It has replaced the environment. In fact, it has become the environment that people interact with every day -- the few speaking to the many.”
“We live, you watch,” say the few.
“We’re
too tired to live, anyway,” say the many. In fact, Harvard scholar
Juliet Schor documents in The Overworked American that the busier a person’s
daily life is, the more TV he or she watches. “And the more they
watch, the more they spend,” she says. “On average, each additional
hour of TV watching leads to $200 of annual spending.” (And we thought
network TV was free!)
Maybe you’ve noticed that as news sound bites have become shorter
(by half a minute, as compared to the 50s) ad time per hour has gotten
longer. The annual “clutter” report of the Association of
National Advertisers verifies that standard network programming now contains
up to 21 minutes of advertising per hour, in addition to all the product
placement ads embedded in the programs.
Schor emphasizes that the Joneses we keep up with (our “reference
group”) now include our favorite TV friends. “The more people
watch television, the more they think American households have tennis
courts, private planes, convertibles, car telephones, maids and swimming
pools…”
The problem of child viewers is especially troubling. By the time an infant graduates from high school, his or her brain will have absorbed 350,000 television commercials, according to the Canadian organization, Adbusters. The typical student spends 1,000 hours a year with the TV, and 900 at school. One Adbuster “uncommercial” shows a passive viewer sitting in a dark living room. “Your living room is the factory,” says the narrator. “The product being manufactured is you.”
That’s why free-thinker Dawn Griffin has not owned a TV for 20 years. When she goes into a house where a TV is playing, she feels irritated about how it dominates the room. “I get sucked into a trance-like state, and it’s hard to have a conversation or write because I’m highly auditory and easily distracted by the mind chatter.”
Susse Wright, another TV-free Survivor, came to the U.S. from Denmark, where her parents didn’t own a TV. She hates TV news because it’s “dumbed down.” She says, “When I read the newspaper, I can scan for the stories I want to read. But with TV, you don’t have any choice. You sit in front of this flickering, noisy box, wasting time.” Is there life outside the box? Ask Susse when she’s kayaking, bird watching or cross country skiing.
“In real life,” says Dawn, “If someone is telling you a story, you have to create the related images in your own mind. You smell a flower or feel the breeze, and you live the experience. With TV, you only experience chopped-up visual images.”
To be or to watch – is that the question?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
David Wann is co-author of Affluenza: The All-Consuming
Epidemic and author of The Zen of Gardening. He lives and gardens
in a cohousing community in Golden, CO that he helped design. Contact
him at wanndavejr@cs.com.
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