Apartment Life 2.0 – Getting Rid of Cable

November 5th, 2009 by Matt DiChiara| Posted in Apartment Life 2.0 | 4 Comments »

A whole new blog category was born out of the marriage between a rant about throwing off the Comcast Cable yoke and a hilarious magazine cover from the 70′s (fortuitously forwarded by The Apartment Nerd) We are way more than ironically enthused to continue featuring articles in the developing genre of Apartment Life 2.0.

Earlier this week, we presented our first Apartment Life 2.0 article, which addressed two pillars of the new apartment living idea — being resourceful and increasing the spectrum of activities that apartment dwellers consider entertainment. Also prominently featured in last week’s article was a cover from the now defunct Apartment Life magazine, which features Ron Burgundy and Veronica Corningstone in their wonderfully convenient and modern apartment home.

Each cover is reminiscent of the liner notes on Led Zeppelin’s 1976 album Presence, the art direction of which was itself a parody on Stanley Kubrick’s epic 2001: A Space Odyssey. The intended joke being something in the way of the ‘domestic obelisk,’ wherein each family has their very own commemorative replica of the alien device, which by catalyzing a long evolutionary process, engendered the happy circumstances of contemporary human civilization.

One particular pillar of contemporary civilization that we’d like to knock down is Cable television. Originally a benign source of entertainment and information TV quickly evolved into an expensive, commercialized, collective generic memory for all of its many subscribers.

(illustration provided by Ben S. Johnson Graphic Design)

At six pm every night, 3 distinct sounds are common to most apartments and households in every city: first, the sound of a person delivering a veritable punch in the stomach to the couch by plopping down his/her weight and worries, the click of the remote and the muted buzz of a TV powering on but not yet showing picture. Even that simple description may elicit a yawn of comfortable recognition…don’t do it! Break that conditioning!

The whole idea here is not spurn all of modern technology, the point is to fill those after work before sleep hours with something more engrossing and interesting, as well as save some money; the best way to do this is to get rid of paying for a service that invariably turns you into a couch potato.

Instead, ditch the expensive cable television, dial in some high speed internet and hook up that computer to your Television. Additionally, you can sign up for Netflix’s 1 DVD at a time plan for $4.99 and use their Netflix player to stream a pretty decent selection of movies.

This way, you can still watch the news, TV shows from Hulu or other sources, when you want to, but the internet doesn’t really let you browse, or flip through all the channels. The difference here is that you know the movie, show or program that you want to see and you sit down and watch that show, instead of bemusedly flipping through all the channels and settling on the least offensive.

Now, getting rid of cable without completely isolating yourself from the rest of the world is the first step; we’ve still to replace those hours of TV watching with other activities. Not necessarily things that are more intellectual or healthier, but things that are way more fun and memorable and exciting than sitting down and staring at something for 4 hours. Even throwing a baseball against a wall for 4 hours, like Steve McQueen in The Great Escape is more entertaining than watching flimsy TV shows saturated with commercials.

Next week, we’ll go over the technical ramifications of actually hooking up your computer to your TV, as it can be a little tricky and may require some diagrams.

Remember, you just need to get rid of Cable to avoid being a couch potato, not your TV. Or, I suppose you could get rid of the couch, but then it you’d need to find a place to put dirty dishes.