How To Make Television Your Slave and Not Your Master
Since its inception in the
middle of the last century television has proven very addictive. Many people can’t get through a day without
major time being spent in front of the set.
Some of this viewing is purposeful, but much of it is just habit. The average American watches over 35 hours of
TV a week, a number that goes up to 50 hours once you reach 65 or older. When you consider how many mindless
commercials you must suffer through or ignore, the waste of time involved, if
added totaled over your entire life, is mind-numbing. What a shame!
Couldn’t this viewing mania be brought under control?
Of course it can, but like any
bad habit it will take some discipline and training. But with that you can work a major change and end up with much more free time to do other things.
The secret to taming your
television addiction is the use of the digital video recorder or, more
commonly, the DVR. Most of my readers, I trust,
already have a DVR and use it. I have
advice for them too, but first a paragraph about the DVR for those who don’t
currently make much use of one.
If you have a cable service
it will offer you, for
a price, a DVR which will enable you to program the cable box so that it
records certain shows you particularly don’t want to miss. This is not hard task to master. Anyone can learn to do it in a couple of
minutes. If you are the sort of person
who is afraid of technology, calm your inner Luddite, and vow “I can
learn to record shows on the DVR, damn it!”
Have the cable company show you how, write down the instructions, or go
to Google and look up the steps. You can
do this!
Once you have recorded the show
(or an entire series if you so elect) you need to know how to find it in your
cable system. The cable company will
show you where to look on your screen.
Mine is under a category happily named “DVR.” Click on that and a list of recorded shows ready
for viewing appears. Click on the
desired show and it immediately begins playing.
Now comes the best part: you are in control of the content
completely. On your remote control
will be a number of buttons. One is
marked PLAY or is just an arrow shaped like this:
You can also hit STOP, which
looks like this on most remotes:
Now the show ceases to play but until you erase it will still be available to
continue watching later. When you hit
STOP you are typically asked by the machine if you want to erase the
program. Unless you choose to do so it
is automatically stored for later viewing.
Think of what this means for
you! You are no longer a slave to the
schedule that the television industry has created for you. Instead you
get to choose what you watch and at what time you watch it. Believe me: this makes an enormous difference
in your life. Your schedule is under your control. Moreover you may decide, as shows pile up on
the DVR list, that you don’t need to watch certain recorded shows after all,
and just delete them. Your viewing is
planned, not haphazard, and you no longer miss things you wanted to watch but
which were on at a time when you wouldn’t be home.
But wait! It gets better!
Your cable system will not only
allow for PLAY, PAUSE, STOP as buttons on the remote but also for FAST FORWARD and REVERSE. These buttons are usually
marked as arrows pointing to the right (FAST FORWARD):
or left (REVERSE):
When the show is playing just hit one of
these and the show will speed up in the desired direction. Miss something that was just viewed because
the phone rang? Hit REVERSE and go back
and view it again. Want to skip the
commercials? Hit FAST FORWARD and then
get right back to viewing the show.
Each hour of television
programming contains almost 15 minutes of commercials! Skipping commercials and station breaks will
really cut down on the time you usually spend watching TV, an obvious benefit. Even better, these buttons can be hit repeatedly to speed up the FAST FORWARD (for example) in increasing increments of
speed. Thus if you watching, say, 60 Minutes but know that only the middle
segment on squirrels tap-dancing is what interests you, you can skip right to
that fascinating part and avoid the rest of the show.
As readers of this blog know, I’m
a great sports fan. Let me tell you how
I watch almost all sporting events (except OSU football games, which we watch
live because we typically have many people in the living room who insist on
that under penalty of death).
 |
| Me and David at Cubs Game |
Say I want to watch a Chicago
Cubs game (and I watch about sixty of them a year). I DVR the game and when I’m ready to watch I FAST
FORWARD to the start of the game (unless there is some reason I want to hear
pre-game stuff). I plan to skip all
commercials (and there are a lot of them), and that saves a lot of time. But as I’ve gotten better at automatically
pushing the buttons (a skill that, like any other motor movement, improves with
constant use), I can also speed up other
things: pitcher-catcher meetings on the mound, foul balls causing a break in
the action, and even slow pitching. If
the Cubs start winning big, I start hitting the FAST FORWARD button at maximum
speed when the opposing team is at bat and only pausing if that team get a hit,
at which point I REVERSE, go back and watch the hit, and see what happens from
then on. If the opposition doesn’t get a hit, that half of the inning is over very quickly for me and I can go back to
watching my Cubbies bat. These days most
major league baseball games take three or more hours, but I can watch the usual
game in about an hour and a half. Same
thing with football, which has lots of moments one can FAST FORWARD
through. Basketball itself is a faster
game, and for those games I usually just skip commercials and lengthy time outs. The Olympics are much better with a DVR. Much, much better.
One other thing: for the sort
of events that typically exceed the scheduled time (sporting events going into
overtime, awards shows, or coverage of news events of uncertain duration) make
sure you record the shows that follow the main show, lest you miss something.
When people ask me what I think
of a famous new commercial I look blank.
I haven’t seen it, and, yes it might be funny, but to find the gems you
have to sit through hours and hours of mindless nonsense and that’s not a
tradeoff I’m willing to make. If
interested I’ll Google up the commercial and appreciate it at leisure and not
by happenstance. Sure, I’m a control
freak, but, hey, I have lots more time in which to do the things I really want to
do because of my DVR and the tricks it performs at my command.
So here is my advice in short:
become a wiz at using the DVR and then you’ll never go back to being that
rudderless viewer we all were when first we turned on that infernal machine in
our living room. Life is short but TV
shows are way too long!
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Related Posts:
“A Guide to the Best of My Blog,” April 29, 2013;http://douglaswhaley.blogspot.com/2013/04/a-guide-to-best-of-my-blog.html
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