My blog this week is about television, but perhaps not in the way you've heard it before.  Endulge me with by letting me ease into this subject with a little context about what's going on in my life.  Or, if not, skip to the paragraph below the "Truth Decay" image.

One of my small groups is reading through Don't Waste Your Life by John Piper.  It discusses what it means to live a meaningful life, a life not wasted.  He presents a very strong argument that the only way a life isn't wasted is if it is in complete service to God.  It's an extremely convicting book.  I highly recommend it.  Click the image on the right to purchase, or visit www.dontwasteyourlife.com to read the whole book for free in PDF format.  Or stop by my house; I have an extra copy for you to borrow.  

Chapter 7, titled "Living to Prove He Is More Precious than Life," brings up the subject of television: 

This is what my childhood looked like. Piper goes on from here into a digression of what television actually is.  He quotes from Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death, which sounded familiar to me.  Sure enough, the book I read a few years ago, Truth Decay, by Douglas Groothius, whom Piper also quoted in this chapter, also quotes from Neil Postman's book in the appendix.  I'd like to give a summary of this appendix, because, years later, what I learned in it is still with me and continues to shape my life. 

“Television: Agent of Truth Decay”

In the 14-page appendix titled "Television: Agent of Truth Decay," Groothius writes that "television is an unreality appliance that dominates our mentality.  We then take this unreality mentality and impose it on the rest of the real world.  That is, we (mis)understand the world in terms of the mentality inherent to the form of communication that is television."  

Groothius goes on to say that though many have objected to TV's content, few have critiqued its medium.  The medium shapes the message, and mediated messages shape us.  He lists four points about the medium:  One, it emphasizes movement over written and spoken language.  "However, when the image dominates the word, rational discourse ebbs.  We are attracted to the incandescent screen just as medievals were attracted to stain glass windows."  Thinking requires that we remove ourselves a bit from the action, but TV prevents this from happening since the moving images are all action.  Thinking, writing and communicating in a linear and logical fashion is undermined.  Language, grammar and rhetoric are "fractured."  Propositions and beliefs can be true or false, but images do not have any truth value.  He quotes Malcom Muggeridge who said, "The one thing television can't do is express ideas."  Another good quote from Francis Shaeffer that's stuck with me through the years:

As a consequence, we loose the ability to think rationally, to be able to support our beliefs with evidence and reason.  Groothius encourages Christians to "restore the primacy and power of the Word as an antidote to truth decay by television."

Second, TV displaces authentic selfhood.  We take on or mimic the (shadows of) characters we see in TV.  Whereas, with reading, we adjust our sensibilities and attitudes to whom we have read.  Reading allows us to engage in "grand narratives and abstract truths."  Contemplating the holiness of God, for instance.  Reading allows us to be active in our journey.  TV sweeps us along at its own pace.  "One cannot muse over a television program the way one ponders a character in Shakespere or in C.S. Lewis, or a Pascal parable...."  With this loss of self in TV, the self "is destabilized, uprooted and hollowed out; it becomes ungrounded, weightless, truthless, opaque to itself -- and it likes it this way, because no alternative is available (on television)."  

Third, TV, by the nature of its medium, fragments continuity.  It gives no rational context for the images that pop in and out.  A sober news story of a massacre in Gaza will be followed by a peppy advert for Disneyworld, followed by a persuasive talk to buy a certain brand of toilet paper.  Postman calls this a "peek-a-boo world," a world lacking coherence, consisting of ever-shifting, artificially linked images.  Without context, contradictions cannot be detected.  Without context, meaning is lost.  In postmodernism, the only meaning is what you put into it.

Fourth, the rapid rate of images in TV makes careful evaluation impossible.  The average duration between cuts has decreased by half in the last three decades, to just three or four seconds, with advertisements much faster.  "The human mind was not designed by its Creator to accommodate to these visual speeds, and so the sensorium suffers from the pathologies of velocity."  Our mind can't analyze images this fast, so the mind just absorbs it.  The images bypass the reasoning part of the mind.  As a church elder told me last month, "once an image is in [the mind], it's stuck there forever; you can't get it out."  Getting used to such speeds tends to make people intellectually impatient and easily bored with anything that is slow moving and undramatic.  The pace of TV "disallows edification, understanding, and reflection."  Compare this to Ps 46:10.

Megachurches are influenced by the TV culture:  they think they must be entertaining to report truth.  "One pastor of a megachurch advises preaches that sermons should be roughly twenty minutes in length and must be 'light and informal,' with liberal sprinklings of 'humor and anecdotes.' "  A few years after reading Truth Decay, I read Whatever Happened to the Gospel of Grace, by James M. Boyce, published postmortem, who echoed the same sentiments.  

Practical Tips to Quitting TV

Groothius gives a few practical tips to become un-televised.   One, "engage in a TV-free fast for at least one week and note the changes produced in your thoughts and attitudes.  Discuss these changes with those closest to you or record them in a journal."  He gives this challenge to his students.  They almost all report an incredible attachment to TV they didn't know they had.  I found this out, too.  They (as I) suffered from withdrawal symptoms at first, but later experience a calming effect, were more contemplative, and found more time for family and friends and reading.  "When they went back to watching television, many were shocked to realize what they had not seen when they were habituated and desensitized to this medium:  most television programming is insipid, illicit and idiotic."

Two, if you can't go "cold-turkey," then create TV-free zones and times.  For me, I was accustomed to getting dinner and plopping on the couch in front of the tube.  Change it up.  Eat in the kitchen instead.  (Remove the TV from the kitchen if you have one there.)  Instead of the TV being the focus of the living room, rearrange the furniture so it is not.  Hide the TV with a rug or cabinet.  This breaks the TV-reflex and gives you a chance to choose something better.  

Three, replace TV with truth-enhancing activities, such as reading thoughtful books.  Reading (and truth) is an antedote to the effects of TV.  "The very act of reading demands a deep level of intellectual engagement and bestows tremendous pleasure and benefit for the faithful."  He quotes Postman at length to drive this last sentence home.  Reading is active, watching is passive.  He encourages us to read the Bible.  I would add "daily:"  join my read-the-Bible-in-a-year group!  :)  

My Thoughts

That's a quick summary of the 14-page appendix.  Thought I'd share.  This appendix more than anything else in the book has stuck with me for several years.  This Lent I will be TV-free for 3 years.  The first two weeks were so hard (near to the point of having shakes, I'm serious, it was that hard!), but I am so glad I did it!!  Note, if there's a TV on in the room, I may watch it to be "social," but if the primary watcher leaves the room and it's just me, I turn the TV off.  I don't close my eyes to TV in bars and restaurants.  I'm not "weird" about it.  And I'll watch TV for certain special things, like the Inauguration.  One thing I miss is the things TV can bring that written news articles can't, like the airplane crash in NY two weeks ago; I still haven't seen any motion media of this, only written accounts.  But Groothius is right:  I can't watch TV now.  Everybody is going nuts over House, CSI, and those house-flipping shows.  They're so...meaningless (Ecclesiastes comes glaringly to mind).  Sitcoms:  people wait their turn to say their line, to deliver as many humorless punchlines as they can each minute, as if it's a race.  The personalities are as fake as the laughtrack.  The topics are shallow, rehashed grist I watched when I was a kit growing up on Three's Company.  Nothing is new under the phosphor.  And no wonder, if I've grown accustomed to the awesomeness of this:  VIDEO-DEBATE--Christian-versus-Agnostic--Does-God-Exist  

After quitting TV, I found I had a tremendous amount of time.  I say I watched 2-3 hours a night regularly.  Almost three years later I'm again complaining I have no spare time.  Reflecting more, I see I'm writing more emails and Internet posts, interacting with more people, and reading (and listening to) more theology.  All of these things are now "crucial" and I find it difficult to part with these activities (thus my complaints about not having any time :P )  But I'd rather have it this way than loose my brain to the idiot box, the boob tube.  

Thanks for reading!  Below is your reward:  a video from the Superbowl, which is apropos to this blog: