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Life Minus TV: Media researcher at Wake Forest finds those who don't watch are a mixed bag
Journal Illustration by Richard Boyd II
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Published: August 28, 2008
TV or not TV? That is the question at the heart of a new book by a Wake Forest University professor.
Marina Krcmar, an associate professor of communication at Wake Forest, is the author of Living Without the Screen: Causes and Consequences of Life Without Television (Routledge, $39.95), which was released today.
In the book, Krcmar (pronounced "Krutch-mar") interviewed 120 adults and children
from 62 different households that do not have television sets to see why, and how the lack of TV influences their lives. She also talked with 92 people from 35 other households where TV sets are present.
The idea for the book came up when Krcmar, who studies the influences of TV and video-game violence on children, attended conferences where she talked to fellow researchers and revealed that she doesn't have a television set.
"They would be appalled," she said. "The irony did strike me. I understood that I didn't watch television, but I was a media researcher."
But, she said, there are different types of media research. "You can do critical studies, such as what Sex and the City means and how to interpret it," she said. "In terms of my own research, that's not really the kind of thing I do.
"I'm not really interested in the particulars of this program or that program. What I observe is, for instance, how do young viewers respond to violence, to rewarded violence, or to violence committed by an attractive character." For her research, she records programs and goes through them at the office or has students record and watch them.
Living without a television wasn't a conscious decision, she said. "It almost happened by accident."
When she was attending graduate school at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, she couldn't afford cable, was busy all the time studying, and had bad antenna reception. As a result, she didn't turn on the TV much.
"And then I had my first daughter," she said. "My emphasis is on children in media, and I thought,
how do I want to be a parent?" She and her husband agreed to forgo television, which she said didn't prove difficult. "It wasn't like I was watching anything anyway."
Based on the responses she got from people she met at conferences, Krcmar became intrigued by the notion of what types of people don't watch television.
"I did some poking around and found there was not much research," she said. "I thought, I've got a sabbatical coming up. I'm curious. I'm going to do this. I found a publisher that was willing, and I started the research."
That was three years ago. This is Krcmar's first book. Most of her previous publications have been in academic journals. She started by posting some initial findings online and soliciting response, then set out to interview people in the U.S., as well as one family in Canada. She used a combination of questionnaires, time-use diaries and, when possible, in-person interviews.
So what conclusions did she reach about people who don't watch TV?
"They tended to see themselves as iconoclastic and unusual, and tended to see non-viewing as part of their identity," she said. "They had strongly held convictions not just about television, but about politics and religion. And they seemed to be really involved in their communities for the most part."
They ranged from a very liberal, single artist in Boston to a conservative Christian in the Midwest with 10 children. "Politically, they were so different in so many ways, but when they talked about television they sounded so identical," she said. "Both had a sense that television was an industry -- perhaps ‘conspiracy' is too strong a word, but they felt television was really trying to get its claws into them. And they were being counter-cultural."
Some stopped watching television because they couldn't afford it. One New Yorker lost his reception after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, and by the time the reception came back he had grown accustomed to not watching TV. Then there was the mother whose 11-year-old twins were fighting too much over what to watch. "She actually unplugged the television and stuck it in a trash can," Krcmar said. "They said, ‘Mom, you're crazy,' and she said, ‘I know I'm crazy; get used to it.'"
Many avoided television because they felt that TV brought sex, violence, shallow news coverage and consumerism into their households. She also interviewed the children who lived in those households and found that young children tended to parrot their parents' comments. But around ages 9 to 11 they started to say they missed television or regretted that they couldn't engage in conversations when their friends started talking about favorite shows. "But by the time of adolescence, they came full circle and said they were not all that interested in TV.
"There was a sense -- among both adults and kids -- that television was not only not that valuable but it was kind of an annoyance."
She found that some people who watch television became defensive when they met people who didn't. "I remember one quote, and I put it in the book, that a man said that some people felt ‘Us not watching television is a rebuke to those who do.'" she said. "Some people can be sanctimonious, and some people are just mildly proud of it (being without television).
"I think it's very much like other decisions people make, like being vegetarian. For some people it's a political platform, they want to tell everyone. And for others it's like ‘eh, that's just how I live.'"
■ Tim Clodfelter can be reached at 727-7371 or at tclodfelter@wsjournal.com.
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