Thing I've noticed: Sometimes I need to weed my television

One of the most underrated jobs in the library field is that of weeding, that is the process of removing books and other materials to make space for new ones. I think the reason for this is that at the most basic levels of library work, we kind of want to be archivists – we want to acquire new materials and never let go of old ones, because what if someday we need that title? What if some future student, or kid or just a regular reader comes into our building looking for a title and when they don’t find it they decide to leave and spend the rest of their days complaining about how useless the library is?

Here’s the thing, weeding is necessary to make space. Sometimes books are ridiculously simple to weed (computer manuals, legal texts, etc.), but eventually you need to make the hard choices and decide which books you own need to go and which need to stay.

Last week my wife and I decided to weed our viewing habits.

First off, a little context, most nights we watch about three hours of television (not including commercials, which we usually skip past); a show with our kids and then a couple hours for ourselves. Depending these are current shows, TV shows on DVD or sometimes movies, depending on our mood and the fact that we now use a PVR (Personal Video Recorder) means that we aren’t locked into any specific time to watch any show (the concept is called Timeshifting in Communications Studies and a great example of it is to think back to your viewing habits before you had a VCR if you are my age and realize that a lot of what you watched came down to what was on, rather than what you wanted to watch).

There are three good times a year to do some TV series weeding, these being late August, early January and late May – or if you will the times when current series are about to begin or end.

We try to have a one-to-one trade policy. If there is a new series coming out (such as Alcatraz) we look at the length of the show (1 hour) and try to find a comparable show we are already watching that maybe we have been losing interest in (such as Persons of Interest) this way we keep our evenings free for other stuff and can be reasonable sure that the series we watch are actually the series we want to watch. Sometimes we’ll continue to tape a show for a few weeks until we decide whether or not we’ll want to go back (for example we just started taping 30 Rock, so Whitney is currently on notice – we’ll tape both for the next two weeks, but then a choice will be made).

I know this may seem like over thinking our viewing habits, but considering that I enjoy watching television, why shouldn’t I take a little time out of my life to make sure I’m enjoying it the best I can?

Things I've Noticed: Where are all the robots on TV?

When I was a kid there were a bunch of robots on TV, Rosie from the Jetsons, The Six Million Dollar Man, heck, even all those lady-robots from the Star Trek episode "I, Mudd"

(A Quick side note - I'm not actually old enough to have seen any of these live - except the Six Million Dollar Man, I'm just Canadian and therefore grew up on American re-runs and episodes of The Littlest Hobo)

As a younger kid in the '80s there was KITT, Chip Carson, The Transformers, Data and Astroboy.

In the '90s as a young parent, at least I had the Noo Noo from Teletubbies, and for a large chunk of the last ten years I've had the comfort of the Cylons on Battlestar Galactica.

A week ago while talking to my BFF Mike about this very problem the only current robot we could come up with was DJ Roomba from Parks and Recreation (who is awesome by the way and one of the only TV robots I've ever seen as a ghost).

If television was to be belived I thought that we'd all have robot butlers by now but the closest thing I have is my daughter's old Tekno sitting in a box somewhere in our basement.

All I'm saying here is, where are all of my robots on TV?!?

Things I've noticed: My kids don't watch TV the way I did at their age

Lately I've noticed that my daughters watch a healthy variety of television shows (although as one of them is in University she watches a lot less than the other). Favourite shows of my thirteen-year-old in 2010 include Lost (she's watching it on DVD), Merlin (a BBC series about the wizard during his teen years), Doctor Who (the entire current franchise including Sarah Jane and Torchwood), H2O: Just Add Water, a show about (according to our PVR) three crime-fighting teenaged mermaids, produced in Australia, and Doogie Howser, M.D.

A lot of the shows she watches are available through specialty channels like Space and Nickelodeon (H20 airs at about 2:00 in the morning), or aren't currently airing anywhere, but she watches them on DVD at her own pace. Today I was thinking exactly how different this is from the shows I was watching at the age of thirteen.

In 1989, I was in grade eight and had relocated to Sherwood Park (a hamlet just outside of Edmonton, where I had lived until then), and so my television watching was a little frazzled. Every morning I watched The Super Mario Brothers Super Show on YTV at about 6:00am. I watched this show because my other options at 6:00 were the local news, various exercise shows, and perhaps the cartoon Teddy Ruxpin. At night I hung out with friends and didn't actually watch a lot of TV except for Friday nights where I watched 2 hours of comedies on ABC (Perfect Strangers, Full House, Mr. Belvedere and Just the Ten of Us), but past that I mostly read and watched horror movies (coincidentally most of the female leads on Just the Ten of Us had been in Nightmare on Elm Street films).

We had a VCR, and on weekends I would watch Saturday morning cartoons, and classic Star Trek on CBC, but otherwise that was about it - a total of maybe 12 hours of TV a week. My daughters watch closer to 20, and as an adult I watch about 25. I'm not actually saying that this is too much, as I believe that people use television as a way to connect (instead of saying "How bout those Mets, we'll say, "Did you see The Office last night?"), and without seeing a bunch of the shows their friends do, my kids would be left out in the cold.

Its funny to think that just a decade before I was thirteen, in 1979, most people didn't have VCRs, so if there wasn't anything good on television or in the theatres you literally had to make your own fun.

In the end it makes me wonder what my potential grandkids viewing habits will be, will my daughter's 20 hour a week habit seem quaint to them?