OR should i say, frustrating lack thereof?
I don't know how my parents did it, but i was raised watching a very minimal amount of television. And i wasn't very interested in doing so, though i don't remember them ever explicitly teaching me anything about it. My father once quoted a young me saying TV rots your brain even more than school!
A side effect of this which i've run into ever since is that i have no resistance to its constant onslaught of images. One tv show that we watched as a family was Max Headroom, and it's from this that i got the term i often utter after i shake myself from a mesmerized-cobra state: blipvert! We're processing these things so quickly, all-out to be our own superprocessors.. It galvanizes our(my) attention to a pure blank state. And we(i) don't even really have time to wonder whether the snake charmer (to mix metaphors very freely) is offering something or merely using me.
My friends who were raised with the television as an everpresent background noise, who still watch it regularly, don't have this problem. They can go to a restaurant or bar where the televisions are hung just above in the line of sight, and maintain a conversation, not pause midway to read the subtitles on a news article that has no meaning to them. They can wander into a room where people are watching tv, and not be sucked in by the commercials (the only creative genre in all tv-land, from what i can tell).
All i want is some kind of inoculation, a cure! Please free me! There was a bad movie playing in the laundromat and i kept finding myself pausing in my folding to critique the acting. I couldn't even hear it over the dryers. I have a problem.