Can you go 7 days without the tube?

NEW YORK -- Television is accused of many things, from corrupting our morals and co-opting our republic to undermining our families and making pudges of our children. Now's a great time to kick it altogether -- at least, for a week.

That's the idea behind TV-Turnoff Week, which for the 11th year is inviting everyone to "Turn off TV, turn on life." From Monday through May 1, you can join as many as 8 million other viewers in pulling the plug on televison, the Internet and video games.

"We want to encourage people, especially parents of young children, to control and limit screen time in the home," says Frank Vespe, executive director of the nonprofit Washington, D.C.-based TV-Turnoff Network.

Raw numbers suggest a little encouragement is needed.

A Kaiser Family Foundation survey released in March found third-graders through 12th-graders devoted, on average, nearly six and a half hours per day to TV and videos, music, video games and computers.

"As parents stop making TV a focal point of the home, they find the kids become active in a lot of other things," Vespe says.

Taking no position on what's "good" and "bad" programming, TV-Turnoff Network holds that excessive screen time, whatever the content, displaces healthier activities such as play and exercise, while much TV advertising promotes an excessive and unhealthy diet.

Vespe's organization argues against TV as the culture's default mode, challenging the ever-more-entrenched assumption that illuminated screens should always be within sight.

In public spaces -- whether stores or schools, arenas or elevators, airline seatbacks or downtown sidewalks -- TV has staked its claim as an electronic overlay, mediating and often competing with the real life that accompanies it.

Declares Vespe: "As much as people like TV, I think you can find lots of them who would say, 'I don't like TV all the time, everywhere.'

"How hard is it to say to your child that TV is not appropriate all the time," he adds, "when everywhere the child goes, there are TVs?"

For anyone troubled by television's growing presence, the issue is one of control -- or lack of it.

Little wonder, then, that a device called TV-B-Gone got a hearty welcome when it hit the market last October. The size of a keychain fob, TV-B-Gone is a $15 counterweapon that works like a universal remote control, turning off any TV within its 20-to-50-foot range.

No, it can't dispatch a panoramic video display pulsating over Times Square. But it can quickly extinguish any TV in a bar or airport waiting area.

"Just point and press," the package says. "The power is in your hands."

And without anyone being the wiser that it's you.

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On the Net:

www.tvturnoff.org

www.tvbgone.com

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EDITOR'S NOTE -- Frazier Moore can be reached at fmoore(at)ap.org