Fewer TVs at Home? Bring It On!

The number of televisions in American households has dropped. Big deal.

Do we really need to know that 98.9 percent of American homes had TVs a year before 96.7 percent did? Is that a significant drop? It's still one hell of a lot of televisions, all of them on all the time.

Television manufacturers — not to mention television networks — will, no doubt, be jumping up and down, pointing to the (gasp) precipitous drop in viewership. For surely that's what a drop in the number of TV sets means, doesn't it? Isn't viewership going down simply because fewer sets are being watched?

Well, not necessarily. More and more people are getting their TV fix online or certainly on their computers. Larger and larger computer screens mean easier and easier on the eyes for watching movies and TV. Even laptops are getting large enough to command viewing for shorter-length movies and certainly hour-long dramas like CSI.

Anyone heard of YouTube? Good. That's one big chunk of that 2.2 percent drop. How about Netflix and Hulu? Streamers, both, and they are part of that 2.2 percent drop as well.

But does this mean that people are getting off their couches and exercising or playing with their children or other things that will stave off heart attacks and high blood pressures? Possibly but equally possibly not. For if you can watch a movie on your laptop and you do watch a movie on your laptop, you're still in that dreaded sedentary position that gets you into trouble if you're in it for too long.

Yes, TV is great. It's great to watch world events unfold live. It's great (for some) to watch talking heads shouting at each other, in the kind of bread and circuses theater that would have made the Romans proud. It's great to be entertained and informed and made mirthful and made sad and all the rest of the reasons we watch TV.

But it's not great to do these things at the expense of our health or our insanity. Enough said.