Wasn’t meant to be impressive—like I said, there are several factors that helped (short commute on public transport rather than long commute by car).
Time does, of course, constrain people’s lives—I am in constant agonies about how much I could actually get done if I didn’t have to spend forty hours or more a week sat in a place I don’t want to be doing things I don’t want to do—but you’re talking about half an hour a day average, not some sort of huge commitment of time. If you bring a book to work and read on your lunch break, or even just spend three and a half hours on Sunday afternoon reading a novel, you’re doing that much.
As a matter of fact I don’t own a TV—I do watch DVDs and the occasional programme off the BBC iPlayer on my computer, though. I’d guess maybe five hours a week watching video material, something like that.
My point is just that pressures of time really don’t stop the vast majority from committing that much time to something they’re interested in. I can’t think of anyone I know who’s ever said “I don’t have time to watch TV for 30 minutes a day”, or ”...to play video games for 30 minutes a day”, or “to listen to music/have sex/watch sports/talk with my friends”.
What you’re seeing as a time pressure is actually a priority pressure—most people put watching TV as a higher priority than reading. Which is a valid choice—there is nothing about TV as a medium that makes it intrinsically any worse than any other, and one could get far more out of I, Claudius, Life On Earth, an old 60s Doctor Who story or The Ascent Of Man than out of, say, J.K. Rowling or Dan Brown—but it does put a limit on how much time they’ll spend reading rather dense pieces of text.
But that’s definitely not the same thing as a limit on their time, it’s a limit on their interest.
Wasn’t meant to be impressive—like I said, there are several factors that helped (short commute on public transport rather than long commute by car). Time does, of course, constrain people’s lives—I am in constant agonies about how much I could actually get done if I didn’t have to spend forty hours or more a week sat in a place I don’t want to be doing things I don’t want to do—but you’re talking about half an hour a day average, not some sort of huge commitment of time. If you bring a book to work and read on your lunch break, or even just spend three and a half hours on Sunday afternoon reading a novel, you’re doing that much. As a matter of fact I don’t own a TV—I do watch DVDs and the occasional programme off the BBC iPlayer on my computer, though. I’d guess maybe five hours a week watching video material, something like that.
My point is just that pressures of time really don’t stop the vast majority from committing that much time to something they’re interested in. I can’t think of anyone I know who’s ever said “I don’t have time to watch TV for 30 minutes a day”, or ”...to play video games for 30 minutes a day”, or “to listen to music/have sex/watch sports/talk with my friends”.
What you’re seeing as a time pressure is actually a priority pressure—most people put watching TV as a higher priority than reading. Which is a valid choice—there is nothing about TV as a medium that makes it intrinsically any worse than any other, and one could get far more out of I, Claudius, Life On Earth, an old 60s Doctor Who story or The Ascent Of Man than out of, say, J.K. Rowling or Dan Brown—but it does put a limit on how much time they’ll spend reading rather dense pieces of text.
But that’s definitely not the same thing as a limit on their time, it’s a limit on their interest.