Hari's Corner

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I hardly watch TV these days

Filed under: Life and Leisure by Hari
Posted on Tue, Mar 20, 2018 at 21:26 IST (last updated: Tue, Mar 20, 2018 @ 21:54 IST)

I realized that my TV viewing time has drastically reduced these last four years or so. I've not kept track but I suspect that my average viewing time has come down to a couple of hours a week and that, mostly on weekends. Though I was never a big TV viewer in any case, this change in habit has been subtle but noticeable.

I used to watch News channels quite a bit especially back in 2008-09 when the 2G scam hit the headlines in a big way and redefined the manner of reporting on mega scams, but now it's come down drastically since I find all the shouting and slanging matches quite tiresome and increasingly boring. I hardly watch any live cricket matches these days due to paucity of time and also the fact that I'm at work on weekdays and otherwise busy on weekends with personal work. I've stopped watching TV serials/soaps too - for reasons too numerous to quote here, but covered in another article. It's another matter that the quality of TV programming has drastically reduced these days, with drab, uncreative reality shows taking prime time slots. I never developed any taste or interest for reality shows and I am glad I didn't bother to. I find that I no longer have the patience to watch movies on TV, since the ad breaks become increasingly annoying and disturbing the flow of the movie. Rarely on weekends I view a movie or two on Hotstar, on the mobile. I watch Cricket highlights only when India is involved, but my overall interest in cricket has come down quite a lot these days.

My next target is to cut down time spent on social media (not that I post much, but I sometimes inadvertently end up browsing a heck of a lot on my Facebook phone app, viewing baby and cat videos, memes and other random funnies, sometimes for hours on end). It is simply mind-numbingly unproductive; a waste of time. Luckily I have BSNL as my service provider, which means that the data speeds are abysmal for watching videos (and I have a limited data plan anyway) and so I watch videos only when at home with the WiFi connection. Just to avoid spending too much time on social media, I don't plan to get a 4G connection with high internet speeds on my phone.

I suspect that these days, social media addiction has replaced TV addiction for a lot of people, and not much has really changed in terms of the actual passive content consumption. I'm hoping to break even my relatively limited addiction to social media and slowly phase it out completely.

2 comment(s)

  1. Great idea Hari! However I do find that social media can be a great way to find out about discussions about interesting world events. For instance on Twitter there are folks like Elon Musk, or Richard Stallman on GNU Social, or the World Economic Forum, United Nations... etc. These are productive, inspiring stories that we can help spread and learn from. Recently, I have actually begun investigating Mastodon https://mastodon.social/@thinkMoult to help promote the usage of OStatus, which will turn into a new web standard by the W3C.

    Comment by Dion Moult (visitor) on Wed, Jun 20, 2018 @ 17:21 IST #
  2. Hi Dion. Sorry for the late response. Yes, but I've rarely found any useful or intelligent discussion on Facebook, which is more of a meme-sharing platform these days. And most political memes draw only extreme reactions.

    Comment by Hari (blog owner) on Tue, Jun 26, 2018 @ 20:39 IST #

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