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Most of you already know that I don’t really own a tv.  A year ago my husband and I made the choice to not purchase cable and get rid of our large tv.  We have a small television for playing X-Box but that gets pulled out once in a blue moon.  We really rely on our computers for our entertainment, but we still maybe only watch 3 hours of tv in an entire week.  According to WikiAnswers the average American watches 8 or more hours of television a day.  That’s a lot of tv! The main reason we stopped watching television was we realized that we we didn’t actually watch tv we surfed through all the channels at a pace that screwed with our brains.  There are several studies that have proved that constant channel surfing changes the part of the brain that controls our attention span.  Tv messes with that area of the brain to begin with but the constant changing of the picture makes it worse.

The other reason we stopped was because of all the commercials.  Did you know that a child will watch over a million commercials in their life time?  For every 40 minutes of programing, you see an additional 20 minutes of commercials.  If you watch online you see between 4 to 6 commercials and unfortunitally they are the same commercial over and over.  In your face advertising that is tempting you to forget about common sense and spend your money on things that you don’t need.  Whew…stop me before I get to far on this.

Anyway this post is about radio and not tv, but one of the main reasons why I have switched to publicly funded radio is the commercialism.   In an informal study (I counted as I listened) for every 3 songs that were played 2 commercials were heard, so about 6 times an hour there was a commercial.  Almost as many as on tv and like tv the same songs can be heard over and over again.  In another informal study, I listened to the radio at the same time each day for about an hour at a time.  To my suprise the same songs were played during that hour each day, just at different times.  Are we as Americans that dumb that we are lulled into thinking that it’s ok for programming can just be regurgitated over and over again?

I’ve switched to our Public Radio station and College Jazz station, why don’t you?  Pledge your support to your local stations instead of the large conglomerates that keep making us listen to the same 100 songs each day.  We deserve better then that!

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