TV Time vs. Reading Time

Here’s an interesting excerpt from the fascinating book On Combat by Lieutenant Colonel Dave Grossman (props to Bob Parsons, founder of GoDaddy, for recommending this book):

“I had an opportunity to talk to one of the vice presidents at Random House, the publisher of Stop Teaching Our Kids to Kill. He told me that he believes that television is the single greatest threat to the book industry today. When television viewing goes up, reading goes down. When the number of television channels goes up, the number of newspapers goes down. We spent 5,000 years struggling to become a literate society and now, for the first time in history, we are stepping backwards.”

In the words of Benjamin Franklin, all work and no play make Jack a dull boy, but reading doesn’t have to be all work-related, and it doesn’t have to be boring. If I need to fill a gap in my expertise, I know there’s a 90% chance that some smart individual out there has already written it, and this brings me up to speed fast.

It always cracks me up to hear discussions of some latest and not-so-greatest “reality” shows about trading wives and some such garbage. It saddens me when media behemoths brag how their viewership of these shows goes into millions. Foamy the Squirrel has more on this (warning: very strong language).