Yeah… no, this entire chart is bullshit. The actualization section puts the lie to it. Reading books, looking at art, theater performances, playing games, and watching stuff on Netflix is all consumption.
If we make the distinction that you can choose what films you want to watch, fine, but there’s no reason to shuffle books and theater away from TV and films. They’ve only been sectioned off because they realize that imposing time limits for reading wouldn’t fly well, where as restricting screen time is a popular idea. But it’s still consuming media. You can’t get away from that.
Also, according to this chart, you should apparently only read 2 hours of non-fiction material in a day, but unlimited fiction? I love fiction, but I can’t imagine a reason why it would be less healthy for me to read non-fiction books.
They say that the chart is flawed by confusions of channel and content, but it’s completely nullified by that confusion as soon as it starts including anything outside news and social media. You can say that you should avoid certain news sites because they’re shallow, or not reputable, and read more in-depth on other places that have more value. That’s fine. Trying to apply that to all media is completely insane. The range of quality in all forms of art, from television to music, to books, is so wide that any attempt at saying you should do one more than the other is meaningless. It’s about the material, not the format.
There may be some truth to this. I just went to the local production of The 39 Steps and spent most of the time thinking “This is like Mel Brooks movie, but bad”.
I get that theatre is fun. I loved acting and singing in my high school musicals. But there was nobody watching them other than relatives would could really enjoy them. There is a very small chance that a new talent could be found in local theatre. But very small.
IME, my engagement with the acting, content, and environment is MUCH higher for a theatre performance than a movie.
I think the words down the right hand side are key, rather than the generic examples they use in the middle. Maybe focus on whether what you’re engaging with is actualisation vs edification vs participation vs interaction vs consumption rather than whether every single bit of content on BBC includes participation or if every movie ever made is “worse” than every piece of theatre ever performed
Snarky aside: for some reason, most self absorbed directors are blowing their movies out way over the 2-hr limit given here, which essentially means you can’t ever watch a movie. Win? Casablanca is only 102 minutes goddamit. Denis Villeneuve desperately needs to find a pair of damn scissors and cut 2049 in half!
I disagree. Books are way more information-dense than any other form of media, and they generally require much more active engagement for me to read. When I read “The Republic” I simultaneously: imagine Socrates declaiming and Thrasymachus grouching in the corner, translate their speech into voices in my head, unfold the argument in the conversation, etc. This is way more active engagement than watching a video of some actors performing the scene, and it also gives me the time and space to pause to understand what is being said before I move on.
So “InfoWars” obviously confirms your world-view, but it is implied that NPR, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times do not, since they are close to the healthiest things we can consume. I beg to differ; the NPR and New York Times-listening set is pretty representative of what Galbraith called the “conventional wisdom”, and certainly know how to police ideological bounds. See, for example, this Naked Capitalism article about the NY Times editor describing themselves as explicitly pro-capitalist.
If the purpose of this diet is to confirm the conventional wisdom, by all means, continue grazing. Personally I look for more challenging reading. As with a real diet, variety is also important. I enjoy spiking in some well-written conservative writing (I enjoy The American Conservative) and going further left (say, at least to the LRB or maybe some Monthly Review); a diet of ■■■■■ liberal pablum will give you a vitamin deficiency.
I agree, but what’s not important is if books can reach greater heights than film, what’s important is the range. Film also has the capacity to be more information dense than it often is, though not to the same degree as books.
Put any given Dan Brown novel against, say, Better Call Saul and Saul is going to give you something more meaningful for the amount of time you put into it, every time, unless you’re a very fast reader. Maybe not even then. Because to get all there is out of the show, you have to engage with it. You have to understand the nuances of the performance, and the most important dialog is generally what’s unspoken, what the camera is showing you and why and so on.
Pit the best book against the best film or TV show and, yes, the book wins, hands down.
Problem is, by this chart, you get more out of sitting down and powering through the Twilight books than spending the same amount of time with Citizen Kane. And the range of books is so broad that saying books are generally better is also fairly questionable. The amount of crap literature being produced is vast.
And important distinction is that people should spend some time reading something because it’s a skill, and a non-trivial life skill. But let’s not kid ourselves. Some books are full of ideas so terrible they’re as bad for your mind as anything else you’re likely to find. Some film or TV is breathtakingly beautiful and, if the person is making it right, doesn’t translate any more to prose than good prose translates to film. This chart generalizes past the point of usefulness.
Some?!? We could burn whole libraries worth of books and still be drowning in ideas so terrible they are an affront to all sentient creation. However, it’s probably better to spend time reading that dross and laughing at how awful it is, (or contemplating how it found it’s way to creation and what that says about our species,) than wasting away in front of broadcast television…
Well, yeah, TV that’s actually good isn’t allowed on broadcast TV, because it might not appeal to everyone everywhere. (I still hold that Person of Interest got canceled because it started to turn into a show that was actually good, and CBS couldn’t allow that.) And if you’re scraping the bottom of the barrel either way, you’ll get more from the books.
