The Age of Missing Information by Bill McKibben

After being in the city and watching commercial television several times during the holiday season it seemed time to again read Mc Kibben's book about a mythical day spent on a mountain in New York interwoven with a twenty four day spent watching TV. The reason the book is interesting is you can move to the country as we did but if you watch TV in the country you are cutting yourself off from why you may have moved to the country in the first place. The world as mediated by a TV set misses information information about the world while bombarding you with other information and a questionable amount of knowedge or wisdom. Compare sitting in front of a glass tube and watching little colored dots (a TV set) with being around a camp fire with people talking or telling stories.

Mc Kiobben says on page 236 TV misses information on:

• physical limits on our finite world
• sufficiency and need
• proper scale
• real time
• sensual pleasure of exertion and exposure to the weather
• the need for community
• real skills

The biggest lesson TV teaches us is we need to be part of a consumer society and be hip about what is on TV or people will ridicule us.

I finally have found a use for a video camera. The next time you watch TV set up a video camera and record yourself watching TV for 30 minutes. Then spend the next 30 minutes watching yourself watch TV. After that 30 minutes if you decide to go back and watch more TV, try to understand how the TV producers make TV hold your attention or hypnotize you in ways that watching yourself watching TV cannot. Are you that boring to watch? or does TV use tricks not seen in the natural world to trick you into continuing to pay attention?