There’s an interesting discussion taking place at Metafilter (say it ain’t so!) about an article written by a mother who doesn’t allow her daughters to watch television.
Most posters are in agreement that it’s absurd to ban a medium of information just because there happens to be some tripe on TV. You might as well ban books for the same reason (although that said, many people think ‘reading books’ in an unsociable and vaguely worrying activity for children).
When we were first connected to satellite television at home, obviously there was a huge amount of rubbish TV now accessible to us, but during that time I found myself spending increasingly less time watching TV; instead I could be more targeted, since I knew that at 7pm there’d be Simpsons, and at 8pm there’d be Star Trek (or whatever). No more messing about channel surfing. What’s more, I watched so much of the Discovery and History Channels that I practically saw their entire run over a couple of years; it turns out that they don’t have that many shows in rotation, and unfortunately most of those that they do have are dated, which is something that comes into stark relief on any technology programme.
mssv 