I haven’t watched a TV show in 13 days, and the lack of advertising bombardments and white noise and the extra time afforded to me has been wonderful. I’ve read two books (Fight Club and The Lemur), worked on a short story culled from a section of my novel-in-progress Alien Nation, and overall have felt that my time has been better spent. If I could pinpoint the one thing that I miss the most about TV, it would be some sort of ethereal connection with the rest of the country.
I haven’t given myself the stipulation that I can’t watch a DVD once in a while, and while I have a couple seasons of The Office on the shelf, I don’t get the same sense of satisfaction watching them on DVD as I do when watching them on TBS or NBC. When I watch a show on DVD, I feel like a loser, isolated in his house, watching a TV show on DVD (which is what I am at that moment in time; at other times I am awesome). When I watch The Office on TBS, however, I know I’m watching the same thing as a million other people, and it gives me the sense that I’m not alone in what I’m doing, even though I’m sitting on my couch in an otherwise empty living room. There’s a feeling of something greater occurring, a collective decision being made by others across the country, hundreds of thousands of us, all tuning in to the same channel at the same time. Even though we’re wasting our hours by watching TV and being as unproductive as possible, at least we’re doing it together, and that, in some strange way, feels good. And that’s what I miss most about TV.
That, in turn, got me to thinking that maybe some sort of collective feeling of connectedness could be achieved through writing, or, more accurately, reading. If hundreds of thousands of people across the country read the same thing at the same time, would they feel a sense of connectedness with the other hundreds of thousands? Right now, Twitter folk are reading Neil Gaiman’s fascinating novel American Gods. I’ve read it before, and have other reading plans at this time, so I won’t be participating. But I’d be interested to hear from people who are participating, to see if they feel a connection with a greater populace of people, even if they never come into contact with those people.
In college, I read plenty of novels at the same time as my other classmates, though I didn’t feel a connection with those classmates until we actually discussed the novel together in class. My hypothesis, therefore, is that this whole One Book One Twitter thing will not successfully achieve a feeling of unity among its participants unless they utilize Twitter (or some other form of communication, like talking face to face) to discuss their thoughts and experiences of the novel. There’s plenty to talk about in American Gods, and I hope that those reading it continue to discuss it after they’ve finished reading it. How many times do we read a book, close the back cover at the end, and never think of it again. The books I value the most in my collection are the ones that I’ve discussed in depth with other people. Those discussions have given me a much greater sense of appreciation for the texts themselves, as well as the authors who wrote them.
Turning off the TV has proven quite beneficial to me, but I know that if I don’t make up for that lost connection with other people, I’ll feel the pull of the TV trying to suck me back into hours of wasted semi-entertainment, not so that I can see Jim and Dwight on The Office, but so that I can feel a connection with a hundred thousand other people who laugh every time Jim pops Dwight’s fitness orb with a scissors. Every fricken’ time.