So do you think that watching TV or reading is a better activity?
[being the type of blog posting where the author tries to work out his thoughts through writing things down. Apologies for the poorly structured 'argument' !]
An interesting context to this question comes from Robert Putnam’s ‘Bowling Alone’, which I’ve been reading recently. He talks about a decline of ’social capital’ in the USA since the 60s due to a decline in many ’social’ activities. He defines social capital in terms of:
- political engagement (e.g. at minimum, voting; having some knowledge of and interest in public affairs)
- civic engagement (being a member of a formal organisation whether PTA or Greenpeace)
- religious participation
- involvement in work-related organisations (e.g. unions, professional societies such as IEEE)
- informal social connections (going to the pub with friends, having people over for dinner)
- involvement in altruistic/philanthropic/voluntary work
- small group activities (e.g. reading groups), the Internet (e.g. Facebook).
There are a number of reasons why he thinks declining social capital a bad thing (he claims communities with higher social capital are amongst other things healthier, richer, safer. i.e. social capital is a ‘good’). But what is relevant here – what struck me- is that one of the major causes he attributes to a decline in people’s social activity is increased time spent watching TV. i.e., very crudely characterizing his argument, more time spent watching TV tends to correlate with less time engaged in social activities, which tends to go along with communities and societies being less healthy, less safe and less well-off. So (getting even cruder) TV is a ‘bad’.
(Interestingly in Richard Layard’s ‘Happiness: Lessons from a New Science’ book a similar TV = bad equation is made. TV being bad because it makes you less happy with your own life – you feel you and your friends/partner are less attractive with less interesting lives than you did before you watched glamorous actors doing their thang and you wish you had more money to buy the things you see depicted as necessary for the type of lifestyle you are being enculturated into believing you want).
But how does TV compare with reading? At one level, obviously, there is no direct visual or auditory element to reading. But beyond that, what are the differences?
- reading requires more effort (i.e. requires you be more active) than TV [true? so what?]
- reading time is more disrupted (you don’t tend to read a novel in one sitting) than TV (you do tend to watch a movie in one sitting) [is that a good thing or a bad thing?]
- both TV and radio stimulate imaginative and possibly identification activity (you encounter types of people, ways of being, activities that you perhaps wouldn’t in your everyday life) [so both are good things, right?]
You can encounter characters in books, just as much as in TV, that live glamorous lifestyles way beyond your means or station (Jane Austen to Clive Cussler). So we conclude – if we chuck out TV then books then have to follow: to take away one cause of us feeling bad about not being the people we’re not; to stop us feeling dissatisfied with who we are take away the energy that drives us, helps us imagine other ways of being.
I guess, of course, there is less advertising in books. But I don’t know if anyone has ever shown that watching BBC rather than commercial TV has a less deletricious effect on one’s sense of well-being. And there’s plenty of product placement in contemporary novels (e.g. Bret Easton Ellis, Perec) – though obviously this ignores the influence of TV on authors and the novels they write.
So is TV a bad?
I’m mixing things up here: TV may be a bad in terms of declining social capital and consequent effects. But this is only tangentially related to whether books might be as bad if people spent equivalent times reading them. And after all books tend to be much more solitary than TV – which is often watched with other people and discussed as a communal (or at least familial) activity.
So we’re left with: TV is much more appealing than reading (because lower effort, stimulating more senses?) and, apparently, more appealing than other types of social activity. So since TV has become available people have done much more of it and done less social activity. But possibly not less reading. The reading thing is a red herring. Putnam would, presumably, argue that instead of watching so much TV we should be doing more social activity. Not reading more books.
