{"id":8544,"date":"2006-09-23T09:38:45","date_gmt":"2006-09-23T13:38:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/archives\/8544.html"},"modified":"2006-09-23T09:38:45","modified_gmt":"2006-09-23T13:38:45","slug":"number-of-tvs-number-of-people","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/number-of-tvs-number-of-people\/","title":{"rendered":"Number of TVs > number of people"},"content":{"rendered":"

I know we take television pretty seriously in this country, but I didn’t quite expect this<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The average American home now has more [tag]television[\/tag] sets than people. That threshold was crossed within the past two years, according to [tag]Nielsen[\/tag] Media Research. There are 2.73 TV sets in the typical home and 2.55 people, the researchers said.<\/p>\n

With televisions now on buses, elevators and in airport lobbies, that development may have as much to do with TV’s ubiquity as an appliance as it does conspicuous consumption. The popularity of flat-screen TVs now make it easy to put sets where they haven’t been before.<\/p>\n

Rick Melen, a facilities manager, has three sets in the Somers, N.Y., home he shares with his wife. That doesn’t count the bathroom set that broke down and hasn’t been replaced or the speakers installed near their hot tub, allowing them to watch a wide screen set through a window.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Did he say bathroom<\/i>?<\/p>\n

According to the Nielsen study, half of American homes have three or more TVs. In the average household, a TV is turned on for more than a third of the day (eight hours, 14 minutes). The average person watches four hours, 35 minutes of television each day. All of these numbers are up considerably from just a decade ago.<\/p>\n

Now, just to be clear, I’m not a reflexive [tag]TV[\/tag]-basher. I enjoy a few shows and frequently find TV writing to be even better than movie writing. For me, good television can be just as fulfilling as anything in the arts.<\/p>\n

Nevertheless, I find these numbers a little frightening.
\n
\nIt gets back to something we were talking about<\/a> a month ago. In the United States, the electorate is woefully uninformed and unengaged, and when asked, most people say they simply don’t have time to follow current events, learn about candidates, and\/or participate in civic affairs in any way (that includes voting).<\/p>\n

My counter-argument is they do<\/i> have time, but they decide it’s more important to leave the TV on for literally a third of the day than it is to, say, read a newspaper.<\/p>\n

Call it a hunch, but I suspect that when the typical household has its sets on eight hours and 14 minutes on any given day, C-SPAN is not the channel of choice.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I know we take television pretty seriously in this country, but I didn’t quite expect this. The average American home now has more [tag]television[\/tag] sets than people. That threshold was crossed within the past two years, according to [tag]Nielsen[\/tag] Media Research. There are 2.73 TV sets in the typical home and 2.55 people, the researchers […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8544","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8544","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8544"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8544\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8544"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8544"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8544"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}