Living Without TV

I think it was watching all the faces on the movie "Network" in the 70s sticking out their windows and yelling "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore!" that may have first given me the idea that I could do something about the uninvited guest in my living room: to wit, the advertising delivery vehicle known as TV. We ought to call it ADV. "Network" and, I suppose, the sight of all those TVs flying through windows from high rise apt. buildings on episodes of Second City TV. In any case, it was 1981, and I was living in Middleton, a suburb of Madison, Wisconin on the other side of Lake Mendota, when I picked up the old black and white TV I'd had since marriage 4 years before, and carried it outside to the apartment parking lot, and heaved it into the dumpster where it landed with a resounding crash. And I've been free ever since. I've now lived almost as many years without TV as I did with it. And my two children in college never had TV in their home growing up, other than a VCR to watch homeschool educational videos and rental movies on. The benefits of life without TV are just so overwhelmingly positive and I can think of no drawbacks or negatives whatsoever. Go here for a review of Marie Winn's The Plug-in Drug and here for Jerry Mander's Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television.