{"id":5279,"date":"2016-04-11T18:29:02","date_gmt":"2016-04-11T12:59:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/13.201.39.237\/?p=5279"},"modified":"2016-04-11T18:29:02","modified_gmt":"2016-04-11T12:59:02","slug":"parents-hate-television-idiot-box-addiction","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/13.207.105.184\/?p=5279","title":{"rendered":"When Did Our Parents Go from Hating the \u201cIdiot Box\u201d to Being Addicted to It?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

O<\/span><\/p><\/div>

ur first family <\/span>television<\/span><\/a> was a prized possession, the kind of thing you would hire someone like Tiger Shroff to protect. It was placed in the centre of our living room, on display from all corners of the house. My sister and I may have been too young to remember the exact day, but I\u2019m sure whenever it arrived, my parents were relieved that they finally knew which direction to face all the furniture should face.<\/span>\n\nSoon after, most of our free time as a <\/span>family<\/span><\/a> was spent staring directly at this purchase. We\u2019d watch wholesome family entertainment \u2014 the same 10 movies that Star Movies and HBO had on, the thousands of English sitcoms that had just made their way to the subcontinent, the billions of Hindi dramas and their billion seasons \u2014 pretty much whatever the winner of the Battle of Remote decided we would watch on the day.<\/span>\n\nIt was probably going really well until about a decade later, when my parents first discovered that they might have made a huge mistake. It was the early noughties \u2014 evidenced by the thousands of music videos streaming on MTV \u2014 and their children had moved on from private <\/span>family TV time<\/span><\/a> to waking up at 5:00 am to watch whole seasons of <\/span>Full House<\/span><\/i>. My sister and I had moved on to communicating solely via ad-jingles and planning our days around the various TV schedules we\u2019d marked out in the morning paper. Seeing as we were pretty young, and there wasn\u2019t much business to attend to, it was easy to sometimes spend entire days lounging on sofas, in postures that would shock the thousands of budding yoga teachers today.<\/span>\n\nThis information wasn\u2019t lost on our school administrations, which sent home individual pamphlets explaining that letting children watch television without moderation would most definitely turn them into Chandler-from-<\/span>F.R.I.E.N.D.S<\/span><\/i>-quoting-Zombies. <\/span>Parent-teacher meetings<\/span><\/a> were called to decide how much time was appropriate for us to be watching TV. At these meetings, one of the most glorious inventions of the previous century would be labelled \u201cthe idiot box\u201d.<\/span>\n\n

Exam time meant cable was cut off, and getting up in the middle of the night to watch TV was the most rebellious act a teenager could pull off.<\/p><\/blockquote> \n\nThis fear, however, escalated to the point where television became the number one enemy for getting homework done, overtaking other evils like \u201cmagazines\u201d and \u201c<\/span>landlines<\/span><\/a>\u201d. Exam time meant cable was cut off, and getting up in the middle of the night to watch TV was the most rebellious act a teenager could pull off.\u00a0<\/span>\n\nUnfortunately for our parents, as this panic was unfurling, the world\u2019s tech Gods got into a meeting room and decided, \u201cdeffo need more screens up in this B\u201d, and decided to give us all personalised televisions that we could hold in our hands. Our generation moved on from watching <\/span>F.R.I.E.N.D.S<\/span><\/i> on Zee Cafe to <\/span>F.R.I.E.N.D.S<\/span><\/i> on <\/span>Netflix<\/span><\/a>, faster than the mutual-fund disclaimer guy, grabbing any screen we could get our hands on, and shocking our bodies into more convoluted positions.<\/span>\n\nThere was a glimmer of success for our parents in all of this. While they couldn\u2019t control the amount of time their now-adult kids spent in front of screens, they did succeed in getting a giant chunk of us to stop wasting time on the \u201cidiot box\u201d. More younger people than ever are moving to <\/span>online streaming sites<\/span><\/a>. Once JioTV officially launches, it\u2019s estimated to bring another 215 million of us online.\u00a0<\/span>\n\nMeanwhile, it\u2019s especially ironic that the biggest adopters of the television today are not <\/span>students<\/span><\/a>, but the same parents who hated it. The generation that warned us extensively about the idiot box damaging our brains and turning us into violent criminals, now spend the most amount of time in front of their former arch-nemeses.\u00a0<\/span>\n\n

The generation that warned us extensively about the idiot box damaging our brains, now spend the most amount of time in front of their former arch-nemeses. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n\nBack at home, my own parents adopted the television as their own child. From 8:00 am to 11:00 pm, there\u2019s a constant hum of static in the background, punctuated by a laughter track every 10 minutes. It doesn\u2019t really matter what\u2019s on, it could be a child reality show, or Tata Sky shop, the television is always on, the volume is always turned up to a hundred, and even the <\/span>neighbours<\/span><\/a> know what we\u2019re watching.\u00a0<\/span>\n\nAccording to this <\/span>BARC study<\/span><\/a>, almost all houses in India still have their television sets, but nearly 40 per cent of Indians who watch TV together are between the ages 40 and 60. This trend is apparent over the world \u2014 retired Americans watch <\/span>double the television<\/span><\/a> that the younger generation does. Even this <\/span>study from Finland<\/span><\/a>, of all places, says the elderly spend more time in front of the television.\u00a0<\/span>\n\nYou can see it for yourself: glance into any house in the city (without being too creepy about it) and the first thing you\u2019ll notice is the oldest person in the house seated firmly in front of a screen staring directly into the screen.<\/span>\n\nSomehow over the years, the TV went from the malignant \u201cidiot box\u201d to benign quality family entertainment again. It makes sense that we don\u2019t all watch Netflix together \u2014 no matter how old you are or how cool your relationship is with the family, it only takes a few seconds of a sex scene online before someone leaves the room sweating. TV is so much safer, and no one has to decide what to watch. I can imagine it already. A parent-teacher meeting held not too far in the future where parents are agonising over how to get their kids off their <\/span>idiot phones<\/span><\/a> and back in front of the TV again.<\/span>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My parents have adopted the television as their own child. From 8:00 am to 11:00 pm, there\u2019s a constant hum of static in the background, punctuated by a laughter track every 10 minutes. It\u2019s ironic that the biggest consumers of the television today are the same parents who hated it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":119,"featured_media":5280,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[107],"tags":[316,8998,1341,8999,1726,4228,3446,291],"class_list":["post-5279","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-pov","tag-addiction","tag-family-entertainment","tag-netflix","tag-online-streaming","tag-parents","tag-students","tag-television","tag-tv"],"yoast_head":"\nWhen Did Our Parents Go from Hating the \u201cIdiot Box\u201d to Being Addicted to It?<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"My parents have adopted the television as their own child. From 8:00 am to 11:00 pm, there\u2019s a constant hum of static in the background, punctuated by a laughter track every 10 minutes. 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