I stopped watching television more than a decade ago and miss absolutely nothing about it.
Weather forecasts are the only news I care to have access to and those are available now on-demand via the world wide web. Wasting precious time sitting in front of a television watching pure crap pour out of it in repetitious, serialized fashion is as uncomfortable as it is idiotic. If I need to know something beyond a current weather forecast, I can access enormous amounts of information specific to my needs in multi-media via web searches initiated in multiple tabs and/or windows of a web browser running on any device connected to the internet much more efficiently than watching and waiting for it to broadcast on TV. That activity has become one of my favorite pastimes since advent and continuous evolution of the World Wide Web. It's so much more accessible and it's easier to get at information I actually need rather than a lot of garbage some network TV programming exec thinks I want.
And a funny thing has happened as a result of quitting television: absolutely nothing bad and gobs of good.
Not the least of which has been a lot of free time available for building brain power through every TV alternative imaginable–from reading and writing to music composition and studying advanced mathematics and physics for fun. As brain power has increased, it has become all too obvious how much incredible stuff I know nothing about, totally ignored during the unrecoverable decades of time wasted watching TV, and my interests have expanded exponentially.
More on that subject is available in Karl Albrecht's excellent book BRAIN POWER. Searching that book for "Steve Allen" yields his insightful take on TV's cumulative negative effects on society, and one of my favorite chapters of this book begins on page 45: 3 - Crap Detecting:
As with most everything presented as "method" by people claiming to have answers, I don't buy into everything in this book, but it is an interesting read (and I just wanted to see how a Google Books embed looked in the blog).
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