Just say no to TV

But be careful what you then say yes to.

At least, that is how we see the rather recent change in TV subscriptions. The early adopters are announcing they are tired of "wasting" time and paying high cable bills. So, they are saying no to TV.

Before you begin to feel guilt about your old-school ways of TV viewership, let's look a bit closer as to where the time is going. The statement "I don't have the time to waste on TV" is usually followed by the fact that they still get their fixes from Netflix and iTunes. Or video games. Or "surfing" the web. Or chatting, or watching youtube, or reading RSS feeds. So the time is being spent elsewhere, and many times it is just another form of consumption entertainment.

The fact is so many of us living in the US have an abundance of free time relative to prior history. TV has been, so far, the most popular way to fulfill that free-time. The fact is we all spend our time in different ways -- and not watching TV is not necessarily more "respectable" than spending time on a social network or fantasy sports forum. It is just different, and needs to be measured a bit different as well. But how?

The blog Shirky (which we stumbled upon while spending free time reading a RSS feed, and not TV), talks about the value of productivity. For them, the difference is consumption vs production.

Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that's 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads.

So, before you turn off one free time activity for another, ask yourself: are you producing, or consuming?