The idea is simple: take your TV, your DVD player, your video iPod, your XBOX 360, your laptop, your PSP, and say goodbye to them all for seven days. Simple, but not at all easy. Like millions of others before you, you'll be shocked at just how difficult - yet also how life-changing - a week spent unplugged can really be.
But there's a lot more to TV Turnoff Week than shaking up your relationship with passive entertainment. It's all about saying no to being bombarded with unwelcome and unhealthy commercial messages. It's about saying no to unfettered corporate media concentration and to the democratic deficit that results. And it's about challenging the heavily distorted reflection of the world that we see on the screen, a reflection that is keeping us ill-informed and unaware of the very real political and environmental crises that we all currently face.
For 2007, we returned to the kind of stunt that spawned the Adbusters Media Foundation and our ongoing Media Carta Legal Battle against the corporate gatekeepers that control access to the public airwaves. And students, teachers, parents and activists from around the globe - literally millions of them - found other ways to get involved, whether they spread the word with DIY poster campaigns or just spent seven days liberated from the commercial information grid.
Check out the TV Turnoff Week 2007 wrap-up to read some letters from TV Turnoff Week participants.
Thank you to everyone for your generous donations to support this year's International TV Turnoff Week. Once again, the campaign was a tube-smashing success!
In the end, we were able to run our updated "TV Head 2007" uncommercial three times on CNN Headline News' Glenn Beck Ñ a real jolt of cognitive dissonance, especially since it followed a clever snippet of Dow Chemical propaganda.
At the same time, ABC rejected the ad outright, while several other cable and broadcast networks stalled our attempts to buy air time - proving, once again, exactly how difficult it is to get dissenting opinions past the corporate media gatekeepers that control the public airwaves.
The pocket-sized TV-B-Gone zaps virtually any television, anywhere. Learn more »
