After reading Bowling Alone, it is pretty hard not to think television is, in many ways, to blame for the demise of community involvement and, by extension, society. I have resisted that conclusion for a long time because it is so easy to blame television…and so many elitists revel in their denigration of TV and people who are “addicted” to it. Putnam makes, I think, a good effort not to fall into that simple argument, but his data analysis reveals that unquestionably, sitting there watching the “boob tube” is a depressing, ultimately unsatisfying experience.
I am sitting here in front of a black 55″ screen, while I write this blog…or read a book…or talk with my wife–in all of those cases I am not engaged in the community. Perhaps it is better for my own psychic health, but I am not building any social capital. If this blog were being read by more than a half dozen people…perhaps one could argue that the writing and thinking was in some way contributing to things–but it is not true engagement.
So what should I do? The kids are in bed and realistically, the most engaging thing tonight is watching “The Office” and then trying to surf between Grey’s Anatomy and Scrubs. Or, perhaps I could go upstairs and install some software on my computer in order to get a pet project of mine, a Boston version of this bicycling trip planner website working. But working on that is a very solitary pursuit, it isolates me in my home office hacking away on my computer while my wife knits downstairs.
There are plenty of things to do…some of them are more “valuable” than others and all involve a different allocation of time and tradeoffs. But none of them involve the kind of face-to-face community interractions that build social capital. Of these activities, arguably, watching TV might be the most beneficial because it:
- allows my wife and me time to relax and decompress without worrying about keeping up with the kids or work or whatever that has been nonstop since we woke up
- allows my wife and I to share time together, commenting on what we are watching and sharing the same experience. One of the things I recognized recently when reading Daniel Goleman’s Social Intelligence was the importance of the subconscious mirroring neurons in our brains…the idea that “just being there” is important and healthy because when you are with another person, you tend to get in tune with them at a subconscious level. The TV provides a common stimulus that we each react to and then react to each others reactions. We’re not just staring blankly at the screen.
- also along the lines of “shared experience” the TV show provides “something to talk about” at work. At my current job, at least half the people are anti-TV types, and there is no water cooler gathering, no shared trivial experiences to talk about. But in nearly every other school and work environment, the popular TV culture provided a safe (i.e. non-political) source of material to start conversations over and engage in the kind of chit-chat that helps build and maintain basic rapport. In contrast, politics, especially in an environment where we are all basically liberals, leads to long time-wasting discussions about things we can’t do anything about.
Now if that is just a rationalization, let us again consider what else “better” I could be doing? First, I could consult this list at BetterTogether.org for some great (and simple) ideas like “Call an old friend.”
That’s great for somebody who is actively engaged in trying to understand this issue…but the fact that I have to go find a website to tell me to call an old friend is pretty sick. The fact is, those obvious, simple, NICE things on the list are not occurring to people. People, in general, have gotten out of the habit of doing the kinds of social things that used to be common social sense/decency.
Does TV make it too easy to turn off your social brain? Perhaps. If we didn’t have TV, would sheer boredom compel us to get up off our butts and go talk to our neighbors? I don’t know; I might prefer to read a book. Going out and meeting people is hard work. Staying home and watching TV…or reading a book…or writing a blog…or writing computer software…are all much easier.
To improve the bonds of community, we need change that is organic, affecting many people at a subconscious level, not a rational guilt trip spurring them into action. We don’t need to be browbeaten by people who complain that voter turnout is low, so get up off your lazy butt and go do your civic duty! But then, it gets back the same basic point I reached in my last long post about activism. You just need to do it. I need to call that old friend. I need to smile at people on the train. I need to hold the elevator and thank the guy who bags my groceries. We all need to start a contagion of niceness and re-engagement.
Turning off the TV is not enough and actually, I still don’t think its an answer. A better answer is to use tonight’s episode of The Office (which I’ve now missed half of) to spark a conversation with a coworker I would otherwise have had nothing to say to tomorrow.
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