From our kitchen window we can see across the shared terrace into the apartment of another family (I’m not nosy – honest!). I wouldn’t normally look so much about what our neighbours get up to, but the main feature in their living room is a huge flatscreen tv. When I say huge, I mean huge, mahoosive even. It’s so large that even though it must be a good few hundred metres from our kitchen to the other side of their living room, we can clearly see which television programmes they are watching…

I don’t find it odd that people have such a huge tv when they sit less than a metre away from it (okay, alright, yes, I do find it a bit odd – isn’t that like going to the cinema and finding that the only seats left available are in the front row?). What fascinates me more is just how much tv they watch. Every time, every single time that I go into our kitchen, their tv is on. And this includes the nights and early mornings when I am up prowling the apartment for water or cannot sleep.

A rough estimate, I think that tv is on for at least 20 hours of the day. Okay, now I hold up my hands and admit that I can easily spend many, many hours on Facebook, Twitter, blogging, reading others’ blogs, but what I love about the internet, and how I see it as different to television, is the interactivity. I can respond to something that someone writes on Facebook and Twitter, I can comment on blog posts and people can comment on mine. The internet is all about the conversation. Television is not (for me anyway). Fair enough, there is a growing amount of interactivity with television these days but it still cannot rival what you are offered by the internet. And, yes, some television programmes are educational and informative, but so is the internet, and in a whole different way. I can look up one thing on Wikipedia and be there for an hour or so, jumping from one page to another, learning new things with each click.

Maybe this is the reason (in addition to the incredibly bad service…) that we cancelled our tv subscription and now just watch via the internet or on dvd. We pick and choose what we watch and probably only end up watching a few hours each week. I must admit that sometimes I do really miss the trashy tv programmes shown, but most of these you find somewhere on the net instead.

How about you? Is the internet replacing your tv viewing? Or do you still love your tv?