On average, women (3.4 hours, median) watch more TV than men (3.0 hours). And, as a rule, TV watching increases with age. Elders, adults who are 69 and older, watch an average of 4.4 hours per day, while Boomers (born between 1946 and 1964) watch an average of 3.8. Gen-Xers (born between 1965 and 1983) and Millennials (born 1984 to 2002) watch fewer hours: 2.5 and 2.7 hours, respectively.
Practicing Christians tend to watch more television than non-Christians. Practicing Catholics watch an average of 3.5 hours per day and practicing Protestants watch an average of 3.1 hours. By contrast, adherents to faiths other than Christianity watch 2.6 hours of TV per day and those of no faith, which includes self-identified atheists and agnostics, watch 2.7 hours. Interestingly, church attendance seems to make little difference in the number of viewing hours. Those who attended church within the past week, those who attended within the past month and those who have not attended at all within the past six months all watch an average of 3.2 hours per day.
Mercy, where do people find the time each day to watch that much TV? I watch maybe an hour, usually not even that. Granted, I have not had cable or satellite for years, and I can’t stand reality shows.
Depending on what time I get home from work, it’s an hour or so of news, then Wheel of Fortune (laugh if you must), and an occasional ballgame in season. Other than that, I have three shows a week when I remember to watch them. If I’m home during the day, I do like cooking shows. Evening culinary programming, not so much.
Ok, and the occasional episode of Ancient Aliens for grins. But that’s it.
One friend of mine jokes that TV stands for Time Vanishes.
My initial reaction was the same as Archer’s above. Where in the world do people find the time to watch all that TV?? Even if some of it is just background noise while doing other things around the house, the 3.5 hours of daily TV exposure for many millions of Christians amounts to over 24 hours a week. Golly, wasting a whole seventh of the week just watching TV? Yikes, that’s bad.
The following is not a boast, but a simple fact. I haven’t watched any TV programming in years. Not one hour, on either network or cable or satellite, etc. One of the best and most influential decisions that my wife and I ever made as parents was to banish the TV from our home during the 20 years or so that our two kids were growing up. As a result, we played a lot more games and talked a lot more together. We read aloud a lot. And our children weren’t just protected from lots of inane or corrupting shows. They were also shielded from a great deal of dangerously materialistic commercials that are all too good at arousing a desire to buy stuff we really don’t need.
Of course, that complete shunning of TV might not be a good thing if I had the responsibility of caring for a parish as its pastor, since I’m obviously out of touch with something very important in lots of people’s lives and not up on a very influential force in our culture. But I’m not a parish priest, and I prefer to do many other things than watch TV.
Such as watch the Anglican blogs. Hmmm, maybe there’s the secret as to how I can blog here so much…
David Handy+