151 hours of television a month?!

I read a statistic today that really surprised me. The average American watches 151 hours of television a month. That's nearly the equivalent of a full-time job, or five hours every day. It is apparently also an all-time high for television viewing. I really find that hard to believe. And if the average American watches that much, how much extra does this average person have to watch to make up for my total lack of television viewing?

I don't want to say that television is inherently bad, because it isn't. There is good television out there, but not 151 hours a month of it. All things in moderation is a good motto, but 5 hours a day isn't in moderation, in my opinion. How can people watch that much? I'm not home 5 hours daily between getting home from work and going to bed.

I was also surprised that television viewing is at an all-time high. I would have thought that with the internet that people would be watching less and surfing the web, or emailing, or blogging [;-)] more.

I also don't want to sound like I've never watched television, because much of my childhood was spent in front of the television. My mother always worked, so we stayed with my grandmother before we started school and after school each day, and she always had the television on. I watched so many episodes of Gilligan's Island that I know the plots of every show - not something that I'm proud of, but it's an unfortunate reality. My parents are of the age that they can remember the first time that they saw television, and they think that television is great and always have it on. During my childhood every night everyone would sit in the den and watch television until bedtime. At our last visit back to my parents, I would go the talk to them in the evenings only to find that they would be engrossed in television, so after a while I gave up.

I can remember the exact moment that I realized that television wasn't the great invention that my parents thought that it was. I was about 13, and some show that the family watched each week went into syndication and started being shown in the afternoons. I thought 'Oh, that's how shows end up being shown each afternoon.' Then I had the realization 'Does that mean that Gilligan's Island was once watched by adults?! It wasn't a lame comedy made for kids to watch after school?' My television viewing started to drop from that moment on.


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A follow-up from an earlier post. The caterpillars are growing very rapidly. They've probably doubled in size since Monday and are starting to spin silk, but not build chrysalises yet.