The Zen TV Experiment

1) Watch TV for 10 minutes and count the technical events.

What is a technical event? We’ve all seen TV cameras in banks and jewelry stores. A stationary video camera simply recording what’s in front of it is what I will call “pure TV.” Anything other than pure TV is a technical event: the camera zooms up, that’s a technical event; you are watching someone’s profile talking and suddenly you are switched to another person responding, that’s a technical event; a car is driving down the road and you also hear music playing, that’s a technical event. Simply count the number of times there is a cut, zoom, superimposition, voice-over, appearance of words on the screen, fade in/out, etc.

2) Watch any TV show for 15 minutes without turning on the sound.

For this, I simply muted the volume on the same show and watched the remainder.

3) Watch any news program for 15 minutes without turning on the sound.

4) Watch television for one half hour without turning it on.

This experiment was first proposed by Adam Shand who seems to have taken down or buried the article.