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This week is TV Turnoff Week, the wonderful initiative started by Adbusters and the Center for Screen-Time Awareness to encourage us to turn off the idiot box. I stopped watching TV when I moved out of my parents’ house almost two years ago. I haven’t missed it. Yes, I have a screen for movies and watch occasionally, but otherwise I find things to do like exercise, read, and further my knowledge via the Internet. My only regular TV exposure right now is when I’m in the gym; there I enjoy watching the History Channel.
I encourage you this week to turn off your TV and discover activities that refresh you. Here are ten things you can do this week instead of watch TV:
Pick up a new skill or enroll in a class. Right now I’m reading Rod Machado’s Private Pilot Handbook and studying up on my knowledge before beginning lessons.
Two words: Spring Cleaning!
Go for a walk/jog/bike ride outside.
Attend a cultural event, concert, or visit an art gallery if you’re into that sort of thing (then again, if you are, how much TV do you really watch?)
Go throw a ball or play a game with some friends - it’s about that time of year!
Cook a meal and eat it together as a family. If you aren’t married or don’t have kids, invite some friends over and cook a meal together.
Play a board game or party game. Recently I had fun playing classics like Connect 4 and Pit with some friends. Other current favorites are Catch Phrase and Apples to Apples.
Write something - a short story, a long story, a how-to guide or even some thank-you notes. Start a blog and publish what you wrote.
Review your goals and catch up on your to-do lists. Don’t kick yourself, just give yourself permission to take a fresh stab and make progress towards things you want to accomplish.
What about the Internet? Shouldn’t we turn that off too?
To that I’d ask: Are you learning and engaging your mind on the Internet, are you doing something interactive? Or are you just surfing MySpace, Facebook, or going from video to video? The Internet is fundamentally an interactive medium. TV is fundamentally one-way. Steve Jobs was quoted in Macworld as saying, “You watch television to turn your brain off and you work on your computer when you want to turn your brain on.” This week, try dialing back your consumption online, and dialing up learning and creating.
Further Reading on TV Turnoff Week and on TV Watching
The other day I snapped a pic of a comedic moment with my roommates and uploaded it via Facebook Mobile with the caption “Our dryer ties knots better than a boy scout.” Here’s the photo (starring my roommate Nick):
Then a couple nights ago I called Steve Bliss, one of my two co-authors on Virtual LEGO and guardian of the LDraw Parts Library. I haven’t talked to Steve in a couple years. When his wife Kristin learned it was me on the phone, she yelled across the room “your dryer ties knots?”
What a great practical reminder of the power of the Facebook newsfeed.
“Lifecasting,” or broadcasting your activities via the web and social networks like Facebook are fundamentally changing the way we relate to each other. This is both exciting and scary (and possibly even creepy depending on who you accept friend requests from). These tools have given us the power to passively stay “involved” in others’ lives without us even realizing it. It’s only surreal moments like these that serve to remind us of what we are active participants.
And for the record, both Steve and Kristin have recently made the cut to my new “trusted” privacy group on Facebook, so I don’t care what they know about my dryer’s activities.
Having read many of the criticisms leveled at Sarah Lacy in the wake of her Mark Zuckerberg interview at SXSW (video), I offer this quick thought. In fact, it’s not even mine. Nor is it new, some dead famous guy said it.
“It is not the critic who counts, nor the man who points how the strong man stumbled or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena; whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly…who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, and spends himself in a worthy cause; who, at best, knows the triumph of high achievement; and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.”
Theodore Roosevelt
Offering my own analysis of the interview itself (which I did watch, though I wasn’t there) would be beating a long-dead horse. The point here is, for the mistakes made, Lacy was the one in the arena. While there’s value in constructive suggestions and lessons learned for improvement, outright (and sometimes mean-spirited) criticism reveals character.
It’s easy to take pot-shots from the sidelines. In some circles, it’s even cool. It’s much harder to get in the arena and put your neck on the line. I’ve played both roles, as I’m sure many of you have. It’s my constant aim to criticize less and do more. Is it yours?
The last few times I’ve driven into the city, I’ve noticed more and more of these LED billboards popping up. They’re like having a bunch of TVs pointed at you as you drive, unavoidable in their bright flashes and demands that you BUY BUY BUY.
Until recently, displays like these have been relegated to downtown crossroads like Times Square, now they’re invading our backyards. I can only imagine the recent growth in LED technology and reduction in cost to producing these devices has contributed to their emergence. Couple that with media fragmentation and advertisers desperate for eyeballs, and what do we get? Advertising that’s more and more interruptive and irritating (as if the stretch of I-294 between 88 and O’Hare wasn’t bad enough already).
I won’t pretend that I don’t revile these billboards. What I don’t have (yet) is a consistent philosophy and belief system as a marketer myself, of what advertising is ‘good’ and what is ‘bad.’
In my pseudo-hippy phase, which was brief (and no I won’t show you pictures), I became a fan of Adbusters magazine. I resonate with a lot of their thoughts on how commercial culture pollutes the mental environment, but I eschew the mag’s hyper-liberal conspiracy theory politics. In fact, the latter is the reason I don’t currently read it, even though I still agree with their views on media. They talk about the “mental environment” the way environmentalists talk about preserving our physical environment. In essence, they brought a phrase to what I’d been sensing — an onslaught of commercials and content that was not relevant to me and that was designed to disrupt thought and create a sense of need that wasn’t there before. The intense, sickly feeling of being sold to at every corner.
From a business perspective, these billboards are a new market opportunity, the result of technology enabling advertisements to be more effective. Now advertisers can fraction off use of a billboard space, presumably making outdoor advertising more cost effective for advertisers, and allowing ads to be more targeted (an ad for morning commuters, for example, who tend to fall in certain demographics). Seems innocuous enough, until you consider how this affects the audience on the road and how these blaring ads stir up more angst in an already frustration-filled part of the day–the commute.
So I must ask, at what cost will we continue to push the envelope of interruptive advertising? In an age where online, marketers are moving more and more towards permission-based techniques and even social marketing that’s far more targeted, mass media is soldiering on with more resolve than ever to annoy the p*** out of people. Continuing, as they always have, to talk AT their consumer (whom they see as an object to sell to) rather than TO their customer (a person who chooses to buy).
We all live in a world of perceptions. Though I didn’t watch much MTV, I’m a card-carrying member of the generation that borrows it’s namesake. Further, I “grew up” on the Internet through high school and college, where the concept of online reputation has grown in importance to the point where the web set obsesses over it.
We’re barraged every day by messages telling us what to be, how to look, and how to live. Mass media and peer pressure insists we wear certain clothes, buy certain brands, and act in certain ways to be accepted. In online terms, article after article shows and tells us what to do online to build your image and reputation: produce a certain amount/quality of content, and even to use certain “cool” web sites and have social profiles that tout not only your business acumen but show that you can party like a rockstar.
With this barrage comes the fear that you don’t look good and that others see right through you, but as Derek Zoolander asks:
I wonder if there’s more to life than being really really, ridiculously good looking?
It’s easy to lose sight of the fundamentals in life when you’re living on the inside of a digital bubble. Life is more than how people perceive you.
Integrity “Looking good” won’t gain you respect when faced with a difficult decision. The decision or stance you take might not be popular in the moment, but those whose opinion matters will respect you in the long run. Integrity isn’t a badge you slap on yourself and suddenly have. Integrity is a character trait you have as a result of being truthful in a situation even when it doesn’t benefit you, and by living a life where your actions line up with your words and your stated beliefs.
Relationships
“And what about those shoes you’re in today
They’ll do no good
On the bridges you burnt along the way”
– Jack Johnson, “Gone”
“Looking good” and being successful won’t gain you fulfillment without rich relationships and people to share your life with. The most important of these people are family; spouses and children, parents and lifelong friends. Also are those in your areas of influence including church groups, hobbies, civic activities, and your professional network with whom you have a strong connection. Even if you are really really ridiculously good looking–either financially speaking or with a glowing career, it won’t mean much without the love and friendship of others.
I was at the Denver airport on Monday. Before I whipped off my belt and set my laptop in the tray, I snapped a picture of this sign by the security line:
Tell me my taxpayer dollars don’t actually go to pay for a sign with an illustration telling people they can’t bring bombs on planes??
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Having read many of the criticisms leveled at 
