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IsTVReallyAddictive 7 - 02 Feb 2009 - Main.LaurenRosenberg
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I know we have touched on this in class, and that we have touched on much more that should perhaps be far more troubling, yet I keep coming back to TV. So, forgive this post for not being on the readings themselves, but it’s been on my mind. I have to wonder, is TV really destroying my ability to retain information? Is it really so simple that, as we heard growing up, television rots your brain? I have to admit that I watch a good deal of TV in a week—at least an hour a day and much more on the weekends. I eat dinner in front of the TV, and my breaks from studying tend to be curling up on the couch and watching a TIVO’d episode of House. Since TV first came up—I’ve been telling myself that I should go a week without watching it just to see what happens. But I haven’t, and when it actually comes down to it, it feels a lot harder than I would have thought. I was at first skeptical in class of the claim that TV is addictive (because, of course, I’m not addicted—the classic response). But this weekend I found that I’d gone through all my episodes of House, and ended up watching a show that just wasn’t good, and that I didn’t even like, just because I wanted to watch something. Google searches actually reveal quite a few websites on the topic, and some contain “survivor” stories of the cured. So I have to wonder, am I really addicted to television? | | | | |
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Thank you, Professor Moglen, for the redirection of this topic. I think that you are correct in pointing to the larger problem of how we, as law students, can use self-destructive behavior as a coping mechanism for our fears and for problems that we do not know how to solve. In my own experience, I have found that I often come home after a long week of school and want nothing more than to "veg out" (a quite appropriate term for these mindless activities).
I have always watched television, but I was previously much more content watching thought-provoking shows--not that you learn something tangible, but that you are required to piece together bits of information to understand a larger theory. Now I am drawn to completely mindless TV to simply relax from the tiring week. It isn’t that I am literally exhausted so that my mind cannot function; if that were so, I would simply go to sleep. Maybe these activities are coping mechanisms for larger fears and qualms of law school.
Particularly I fear that the law school curriculum, for the most part, does not help to guide us into becoming who we want to be. From most students’ introductions it appears that we have a particular goal in mind but no clear understanding of how to achieve it. I fear that I will graduate law school with a world of opportunities but without a better understanding of how these opportunities fit into these goals.
Last week I attended a research presentation relating to life satisfaction in middle-age lawyers. The good news was that most of these attorneys reported being quite happy with their jobs and lives. The bad news is that they were in their 40s and the majority of them had changed jobs about 3 times. If you couple this data with prior studies showing that the majority of young attorneys at their first jobs are quite unhappy, it seems that law schools should be focusing a lot more on helping students find the right job. How can we dedicate our TV watching time to figuring out how to become who we want to be?
-- LaurenRosenberg - 02 Feb 2009 | | | |
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