Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out

apathy.

This week, the Nielsen media-trackers announced that the average American now watches an all-time high of 151 hours of television a month. Five hours a day. This number is up from last year, when we only watched 145 hours of television a month. This number, of course, does not include movies, anything on-line, video phones, or the eight hours a day most of us spend in front of a computer at work. This number, as frightening as it is, does not tell us the more important piece of information, total screen time. But if you work a desk job and watch your five hours a day of tv, you're already spending more than half your day, and ultimately your life, staring into a screen. As something of an understatement, we need to consider the connections between our 25% rate of obesity nationwide, the rising occurrence of diabetes, and the estimated 10 percent of the population suffering from depression at any given moment and how much screen time we get. But more than anything, we need to get up. Stand up, walk around, do your dishes, some tai chi, taxes, whatever. Life is short, participate.


References:
http://www.cnn.com/2009/SHOWBIZ/TV/02/24/us.video.nielsen/index.html?iref=newssearch
http://www.docstoc.com/docs/1926814/Depression-Statistics-in-US-Households
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2009/02/tv-usage-grows.html