Olga Panova
November 3, 2008

I didn't have TV in my apartment last semester and I got so used that I don't have it that I decided that I don't need it at all. So, normally I don't watch TV at all. Even when I am visiting my friends and their TV is on I usually don't pay a lot of attention to it and TV is used more as a background voice than entertainment. Yesterday, I went to the apartment of my friends and I had a hard time focusing on one channel, because I could not find anything I would like to watch. So, basically I was just swithing the channels until I found the "Chef Jeff Project" on the Food channel and tried to focus on one show at a time.I never watched this show before. After the show ended we started to watch "Family guy", which I saw before on the Internet. And after that we returned to the Food channel and watched a "Dinner: Impossible".

I was watching TV at my friend's apartment. So, it was two of us. He also didn't plan to watch anything particular, so it took a while before we became engaged in the "Chef Jeff Project". It is funny that we didn't start to watch any of these three shows from the beginning. As I mentioned earlier I don't have a TV, so sometimes I use Hulu.com to watch TV. I actually prefer watching TV on Internet, because viewer has more control over the content to which he or she is exposed; it is possible to find old episodes and there are no commercial breaks.

I like to write about my TV viewing habits. Two or three years ago I watched TV 10 times more than I am watching now. While watching TV yesterday I felt that TV shows lack action. I was very impatient and that caused me to switch channels very fast. I found that I feel better now, when I an not watching TV like I used to. I think it was such a waste of time. I think that even though jounals like Nielsen cannot be ideally precise they can still reflect the overall TV viewing patterns of the population. By knowing what the samples of the segmented audience tend to watch at the specific times, survays like Nielsen can estimate who watches what, when, and for how long.