I dare to postulate that having no TV increases the quality of your life.

I will make some conclusions here, feel free to disagree or call me ignorant

1. Less time is waisted in front of the TV
2. One does not need a couch in front of the TV
3. The TV does not dictate your life
4. Less food is consumed in front of the TV and in total
5. The world is a more peaceful place without a TV
6. Unimportant things become unimportant again (such as politics, and britney spears.
7. You read more!


na ja...that is it for now

I agree, but I think that having no computer can do the world equally good.

1- Will move our ases to get information, we'll become more physically fit.

2- There will be no reason to have desk jobs, everyone will go to the field to do hands on work.

3- Little Mama and Papa stores will flourish after the internet giants get put to sleep.

4- Kids will start going to the library

5- Plagiarism will become hard, less opportunities and temptation to plagiarise

6- No unimportant waste of time chatting and posting.

7- No news or politics.

8- No stinking email...If someone wants to say hi, they'll have to actually get their butt up and visit their friends or loose the friend.

9- If TV is gone as well, everyone will go to sleep at sun set and wakes up at sun rise....nothing to do at night.
The list goes on.

Hmmm no TV... that would mean no South Park or Simpsons or Frasier... aarrrgggghhhhhhh

But on the upside... no more reality TV shows:D... for that alone I'd say wooohoooooo...

And no computers... hmmm.. but but but... that'd mean no Sciforums:p ... and no more legal research:D ... hehehe

spuriousmonkey.....

If we could get QUALITY TV programs then I would be all in favor of watching something of value but as it stands today TV is a electronic wasteland for the most part. There are however SOME great programs , from time to time, that are shown and those are worth the time and effort to view. It is just that there aren't that many of those type of shows around for the powers to be want to "dumb down" most people to make them grateful they get anything at all.

Most TV shows today are only 20 minutes long per every half hour which means your getting only 40 minutes per 60 minutes of watching TV with the programs that you like.

I agree. The key is selective viewing.

I would say the key is self-discipline. I have got to stop staying up till 0100 playing computer games and talking on forums.

Originally posted by truth
I would say the key is self-discipline. I have got to stop staying up till 0100 playing computer games and talking on forums.

That's kindda hard, when our lives revolve around computers and TV....It's like asking someone who has some money to avoid the stock market, banks, and excercise self decipline in managing his/her money...the sucky system is in place, we are just users.

Originally posted by Flores
That's kindda hard, when our lives revolve around computers and TV....It's like asking someone who has some money to avoid the stock market, banks, and excercise self decipline in managing his/her money...the sucky system is in place, we are just users.

It is hard but possible. Staying up to wee hours of the night playing games and talking to strangers is not productive nor healthy...it is simply entertainment whereas investing money in stocks is a gamble but it holds promise of paying off and almost something is always expected if the money is carefully invested. The system maybe in place but it is there because we Choose to use it, not because we have to. Self discipline is the key.


Spurious

I dare to postulate that having no TV increases the quality of your life.

I dare to disagree

1. Less time is waisted in front of the TV
2. One does not need a couch in front of the TV
3. The TV does not dictate your life
4. Less food is consumed in front of the TV and in total

True, true, true and true

5. The world is a more peaceful place without a TV

I doubt that, I see TV as a distraction which keeps the issues between people from coming up once they start talking to each other instead of watching.

6. Unimportant things become unimportant again (such as politics, and britney spears.

On the contrary. Politics has been made avaliable to people through the medium of TV, people are more informed about their government than they were before television, they have more options and choices made open to them through the information televised through telelvision.

I agree with you on Britney Spears


7. You read more!

Nope, reading is a love people have....having televised nonsense will not deter those who are passionate readers from reading less. Also for visual people like me watching TLC (well not anymore since it turned into the shithole with Trading Spaces episodes running 24/7, money whores) or Discovery Channel (also slowly fading away into Reality TV oblivion) is easier to learn from.

But two words really kill your whole argument

The Simpsons

I equate TV to a used car salesman or real estate agent. It is only trying to sell you something.

There is no question that the quality of life increases with less or no TV.

... from the average American moron. (There's a thread on that topic, not my original thought.) But not from you people. You're all bright, concerned, and social. (I beg to differ with the person who decried staying up and communicating via SciForums or other cybermedia. That is socialization, just a different kind than your parents had. It's healthy. Don't sweat it. Be glad you're not me as a child living out in the desert in Arizona with nobody to talk to except during school hours.)

The TV has an off button, dammit. If you're watching it, it must be because you want to and you feel you're getting something out of it. You have a fair amount of leisure time and you're using it the way you choose. Don't be so hard on yourselves.

No recent generation of Americans were big readers, you're no different. A really successful book sells only a million copies. Think about what that means!

So you think you're lazy. Every generation goes through that too, usually during adolescence. It's just a normal phase of life. You're no lazier than your parents' generation or my generation was.

So there's a lot of crap on TV and you watch some of it. Everybody before you has done that too, regardless of the medium. In the days when books were popular they coined the term "guilty pleasures," meaning books you read but were embarrassed to admit. People got together and talked about reading Joseph Conrad and Saul Bellow, and yes they did read those books, but they also took a break and read westerns and romance novels. Same with music. During the late 1970s everybody was into jazz and classical music. Yet somebody was buying all those Journey and Foreigner records.

Even mediocre literature, music, and drama/melodrama has a modest amount of art in it. It doesn't have that universal connection of Shakespeare or the Beatles, but it connects with some of the people some of the time. I've seen stunning, moving, thought-provoking scenes on soap operas. (One of our own guilty pleasures is General Hospital.)

Reality shows? Personally I can't fathom their appeal, but that doesn't mean that no one else can. People connect with other people's reality. Just because I don't understand it doesn't make it bad. And if you watch it and enjoy it and don't understand why, that doesn't make it bad either. Trust your instincts. As long as you're not watching kiddie porn or snuff flicks, there's some wheat in that chaff.

One of the heaviest burdens of being intelligent is that you have a well developed ability to look at yourself critically. That's good, but don't overdo it!

Lighten up and enjoy life. If you think you're watching too much TV, rank your shows in order of how much you enjoy them, and start using the Off button. You people are not the morons of this country. You can make intelligent choices.

Even unconscious ones. You're probably getting more out of TV than you realize. And the alternative may not be as appealing as you want to believe!

snuff flicks (fraggle)


Snuff flicks have long been the Holy Grail of cinema. This may sound like a bizarre statement but the long-discussed and debated existence of deliberately made films of murders has fascinated many groups. Anti-censorship activists argue against their existence because there is no solid evidence for any snuff movie having been made. Pro-censorship lobbies hunt down leads in a desperate attempt to prove how evil Herschel Gordon Lewis fans really are. Cineastes are fascinated with them because they represent the very worst of their beloved medium. And some people just want to see it. But it's important to define a snuff movie. It is not merely footage of a death: there's a grand tradition called the goona-goona or mondo movie, a bizarre and primitive concoction of porn, news reels and anthropological footage, many of which contained scenes of execution. Snuff movies are a whole different ball game: for the titillation of an audience, usually with heavy sexual elements, someone is murdered. The killing is undertaken with the intention of distributing the film for commercial gain. It is the ultimate and most perverse form of depravity committed to film. If there's a hell, people who make snuff movies burn slow and hot in a dark, bitter and toxic corner.

That's if they exist. Snuff films have been faked. Snuff movies have been alleged. Snuff movies have been debunked. The myth is so huge that film makers, not least the makers of the original Snuff itself, use the idea to drum up custom from the curious and intrigued. That's the real starting point of the film: that ordinary people may end up in contact with this material. These aren't demons but people you pass in the street. What does that say about you? Are you capable of going down that path?

8mm (http://www.pheasnt.demon.co.uk/mudge/iss15/8mm.htm)

so ahh..urban legend? kernel of truth? what say you all?