The (almost) ad free life ...

Trying to think when one got rid of the television, we think it was around 2008, it has been so long now that it is hard to recall.

No, we have not stopped watching visual entertainment, we tend to watch less and only what we want to watch when we wish to watch it. Having a fast interweb pipe and being a connected family, we all have a variety of different shiny objects, consoles, lapthings etc so the notion of getting rid was not a fearsome one.

But the youngest did squeak more out of a change in routine than anything else.

Why did we get rid, for four reasons ...

  • It was on and nobody was actually watching it
  • Most of the stuff on is not what we wanted to watch, so we became fed up with the noisy moving wallpaper machine.
  • When there was something someone wanted to watch, there was conflict even with the recording device that we often forgot to program.
  • Too much children's mental mush television ... don't get us wrong, some Children's television programme entertainment is outstanding, but not everything we were subjected to.

So having two teens and a very technical father who already knew what web traffic was entering and exiting the family home. We gave the mega-tv-tube monster to a friend who wanted to give it to their dads old persons home.

Silence, peace and head phones and less adverts.

We still had plenty of social time with the teens, in fact we found we did more as there was not that emotion of turning on the default idiot box. If anyone wanted to watch their fave entertainment they could do so, anytime in a 168 hour period, if they missed it, tough.

Dad started listening to more music, radio etc and doing his thing, Mum was content at being saved from the kiddie trash on TV.

Now, we rarely see adverts and as you may know, sometimes someone will make reference to a funny/interesting advert ... thats nice, but what are you on about. I don't think we are missing out and the occasional advert is now less inconvenient.

We still pay our television licence (we are in the UK) and occasionally via the web we can dip into some of the live terrestrial channels as well as the collection of those available on digital freeview. But to be honest, we have lost the need for these and so rarely want to watch them.

Could you live without your large plasma thing in the centre of your room?

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