Junk food media consumption

Make things. Work on stuff that matters. Produce. I try to optimize my time such that I'm producing more than consuming, but we all have limits. You cannot work all the time, and more than axiomatic advice, I have learned this lesson the hard, more than once. Thinking turns to mud long after the sun goes down and no doubt productivity with it. Over an extended period, eventually you burn out.

I make time in the early mornings before work to hack and I do the same thing with pockets of time after work. But I also make time to not-hack. I'm not just talking about making time for loved ones or whatever, I talking about making time for active consumption. I now take it as assumed that one needs to turn off, that that turning off more than likely means consuming media.

So, is sitting in front of the TV for a few hours a total write off? Is it better or worse than reading news articles on the web? How about reading science fiction?

We're not massive TV consumers in our house, we have a small CRT and if when we do use it, it's to watch an episode of a carefully procured show via our Media player rig. To find out what is happening in the world or what the weather will be, we check a local or internal website, typically once or twice a day (generally we don't consume broadcast TV).

Nevertheless, even with a "carefully procured show" or movie, I feel guilty after sitting impassively for an hour or two. I could be watching a documentary and taking notes, I could be reading a text book and taking notes. Should I be?

The natural breakdown (in my head) of permissive media consumption is as follows (descending):

1. Socially (the other humans)
2. Reading (books, the web!?)
3. Listening (radio, music!?)
4. Watching (video, TV, movies!?)

Here, I use permissive to refer to general social acceptance. For example: I watched LOST last night < I listened to radio national last night < I read an awesome book last night < I went to a dinner part last night. Here the ordinal relationship between these activities is something like utility or benefit. One may be interested in optimizing such things.

Maybe this is generally accepted, at least I believe other people around me might have similar opinions. The breakdown might be as such because there may be built-in assumptions around the level of attention required or the level of knowledge acquisition. I don't like this argument all by itself. How useful is having partial memories of random tech factoids in your head from the 20 technical articles one reads in a sitting? Is this better or worse than one deep but inconsequential conversation, or compared to reading a Hugo award winning novel? Naturally, the argument is not so simple. What I have pointed to is the obviously orthogonal concern of content.

A lot of my non-work time is concerned with consumption of some sort or another. I want to be productive and make good use of my time. Can a balance be found? Can or should one optimize or actively consume media to "turn off"?

I have been on my health kick for nearly two weeks now and I've been thinking. It is easy to snuggle up and watch an episode of some TV show, but is that like eating junk food? To be generally making better use of my time on this planet, should I in fact be watching something more education? A documentary? Something more cultured? An opera? Should I be reading the books from my shelf more than slurping down popular tech articles?

One has to eat as one has to "turn off", but I now think the discipline one applies to the consumption of food applies just as equally to ones consumption of media.

Do I simply have the taste for science fiction television shows and technical new articles on the web? Are they fatty foods I could be doing better without or do they broaden me, my imagination, my dreams? ultimately my personality? Is this even testable?

There's lots of rhetoric here, I don't the answers, but I am also beginning to think that this generalized discipline of consumption may also apply to production and making things.

Image from Wikipedia.