Put your TV set in its place

A few simple steps can ensure that the television set doesn’t take over family life.

FLAT screen televisions, PC monitors, wireless networks, TV reception boxes, DVD players, mobiles, tablets, routers and readers. The bleating demands of entrenched information technology are bullying life as we knew it out of many homes. Worldwide communication may be growing, but it’s increasingly at the price of personal communication as friends are placed in virtual relationships and commonplace texts flit room to room in many family homes.

Most chilling is the recent trend (indicating luxury it seems) towards enshrining a television as a devotional point in every space in the house. Wandering slack jawed thumbs a-twitch through the house, bumping into furniture, the relationship of a bewildered teenager with their phone now transcends all understanding. Even as adults, we seem unable to breathe without an electronic umbilical link to perpetual, pre-packaged entertainment. When it comes to laying down the law and laying out your floorplan you can make a determined effort to contain the excesses of modern media littering up the house and turn the family back to each other.