White Dot is a national campaign against television. They have an interesting site where you can join them and find many resources to find out how to do a better use of your tv.
They also promote some activities like the one of Brighton, where they pulled the people to take some chairs on the evening and sit in front of their doors instead of being watching television, like our grandparents used to do...and we almost lost it. They also have a list of pages to surf and different ways to find your oun entertainment.
Here is the text from their section "about us"
| White Dot was started in 1996 by Jean Lotus as a newsletter for people who don't watch television. In the same year David Burke launched the British edition by standing on a busted TV set in front of a sign saying "Get A Life" near Westminster Abbey and reading out a letter to Prince Charles asking him not to televise his coronation. Since then we put up the website and introduced TV-Turnoff Week to Britain. That continues to receive national and international press coverage. We have also written two books, our anti-TV guide called Get A Life (Bloomsbury Publishing 1998) and our investigation into the privacy issues surrounding digital interactive television, Spy TV (Slab-O-Concrete 2000). We have run Zocolos to promote TV-free living. That is the Mexican word for town square, and I was inspired by the way Mexicans use theirs - sitting outside with other people, all age groups, any night of the week. We leafleted a neighborhood in Brighton and persuaded residents to sit outside their houses for a night instead of watching TV. Turnout was good, and children loved it. A dozen people volunteered to help organize more zocalos. We hope this visible demonstration of "what you do if you don’t watch TV" will spread out of Brighton, generating continuous discussion about how the use of free time can build or weaken communities. We are creating a small Zocalo Kit to help people start their own. In 2005 White Dot helped publicise and sell the TV-B-Gone, a keyring that turns off any television. To launch this modest revolution we got volunteers in London, Brighton, Cornwall, Edinburgh and other cities to zap TV sets in cafes and pubs. |
