TV TurnOff Week (April 25-May 1, 2005) has officially begun. Do you have the guts to turn your television off for an entire week? Can you and the people you live with stand to miss an episode of your favorite show? Are you able to shun the television news and opt for the printed paper or an internet site instead? What would you do without your Simpsons fix?

I believe that television media should be studied, not blindly consumed or, alternately, snobishly scoffed at by scholars. But I love the idea behind TV Turn Off Week. One of its many aims is to try to get people off the couch and more active in their communities, their families, and their own lives. It also aims at raising literacy by showing kids the alternatives to the so-called "idiot box" or "boob tube."

I taught a course in Media & Society a few years ago, and integrated TV Turn-Off Week into the curriculum. I distributed the scary "tv facts and figures" handouts from the Turn-off Network's home page to students on the first day of class, had them read a book on Culture Jamming and later had students make posters (like those at Adbusters) and spread the word on campus, under the auspices of "service learning" and literacy activism. They did a good job. I think my favorite poster was a photoshop trick one of the students used, pointing a smoking pistol at a smashed up television screen. The campaign was only moderately successful, however, because the students could find no way to measure its effectiveness, and many of them put up the posters too late in the term. If I did this again, I'd launch the class with a more agressive campaign.

[Adbusters really takes the campaign into radical territory. Check out their advocacy campaign for TV Turnoff and be sure to check out their "TVBeGone" remote control zapper!]

TV Turnoff had mixed results, but a related and more-successful experiment we performed in that Media & Society course was a "Media Deprivation Assignment" (guidelines in Word format) which asked students to consciously "unplug" from all the technological media they use for an entire day, keeping a log about their "media fasting" and writing a reflection on the experience. I got the idea for of this assignment from a course listing I found online by Karen Cristiano which sounded like a thrilling thing to try.

They all HATED it, but learned just how saturated they are with media and how reliant they have habitually become on it. Students wrote about the sheer terror of actually hearing their car engines while they drove, or the frustrating horrors of not being able to play with their X-Boxes or the haunting sounds of other people's media that they couldn't escape from. Several admitted failure and gobbling up as much IM'ing and CD playing as they could after going half a day without them, like a smoker caving in to the cravings of a nicotine fix. I wouldn't say it changed their lives, but it really opened their eyes.

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