Noise-to-signal

It wasn't my fault that he left. Midway through my second year in college, my roommate transferred to a different school in a different city, and my assigned replacement roommate for the spring semester never showed up, and consequently I had the entire dorm room to myself for one semester.

My departing roommate took the television set with him, and so I entered the no television phase of my life, a phase that has continued until current day though with a few interruptions, such as during my third year in college and having a new, television-watching roommate.

I was ready for the new no-TV phase; in fact, I had been wanting to quit television since before moving off to college, though admittedly throughout high school I was an avid TV fan. I don't remember why or how I wanted to quit, only that I did.

My primary memory of not having TV that spring semester: I learned how to juggle. I found myself with an abundance of free time and initiative, and I had a canister of tennis balls lying about due to a tennis class I was taking, and so I decided to teach myself how to juggle, a skill that has proved novel though insignificant in the twelve years since. And that's how I describe life without television: novel though insignificant.

Also, twelve years later, life without television is no longer considered weird. Back in 1998 it was often assumed that you owned a TV just as it was generally assumed that you had a phone line. Nowadays many young people use the Web to watch shows, and only the weird have phone lines.

But I don't see TV's fade as a progression because it seems that the signal-to-noise ratio we subject ourselves to is as low as ever. I can say without doubt that the signal-to-noise ratio that I subject myself to has decreased, and though the fault is my own, I blame the Internet and the cell phone as my enablers. The Internet is the truly insidious of the two; I haven't even had broadband since moving to Phoenix more than three years ago.

I suppose that quitting the Internet is the modern-day equivalent that was quitting TV in the 20th century, though I can't imagine any sane individual quitting the Internet without also quitting modern society. Quitting TV was giving up on The Simpsons. Quitting the Internet would be going back to paper bank statements, if those even still exist.

The pertinent question then is how one increases the signal-to-noise ratio. How does one avoid those irrelevant bits that have little or no salient impact on one's long-term happiness while still allowing through the bits that do?

Again I find myself wanting to make a personal change, however novel and insignificant it may be.