Graig Uhlin

Ben Affleck - he has a little problem with alcohol. Robert Downey Jr. - he's got a thing for, well, anything that can be snorted. And I can't get enough · HBO?

It's not my fault though. Yes, "The Sopranos" and "Sex and the City" certainly do have their appeal, but I find myself watching long after those shows end, watching long into the night. I'm a bit ashamed of how much TV I watch, and I think I've got a problem. I do it in secret, with the lights off. I steal money from my roommates - to buy cable. I do it at home, at work (as I write this, Fox News' spawn-of-Satan Bill O'Reilly stares back at me from the TV in the Wildcat break room).

I just can't seem to pull myself away from the screen. I don't eat. I can't sleep. My wife and kids left me - or they would have, if I had a wife and kids. I might just be thinking of an episode of "The King of Queens."

I have to face it: I'm addicted to television.

"Pish-posh," you say, or you would say, if you were a dandy in turn-of-the-century Britain. "TV is not addictive."

Oh, but it is. According to a recent article by Robert Kubey and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in Scientific American, the conditions of TV viewing cause a physiological high, much in the same way as all those other less socially acceptable forms of drug use.

But it's not that "Will & Grace" is just so damn funny that you can't get enough of it (although it is, in my humble opinion), and it's not that we simply need to know whether Rachel will pick Ross or Joey (Joey obviously - Ross is a tool), that we spend so much time in front of the "boob tube."

In short, it's the form, not the content, stupid.

It seems all the formal elements of television - all the cuts and edits and zooms and pans - stimulate humans' innate "orienting response," that human characteristic discovered by Pavlov when playing with his dogs. The "orienting response" basically keeps the mind at full attention, gathering information, in response to a novel stimulus (i.e. a TV edit), as the rest of the body slows down. As a result, we feel relaxed when watching TV, even to the point of feeling withdrawal symptoms when we stop, causing us to watch even more.

Basically, the more stimuli (i.e. the more edits), the more we become addicted. Given the number of cuts in a music video, this gives the slogan "I Want my MTV" a whole new meaning.

So what's the big deal? The insight that we have become a culture of addiction is not a new one. Prozac. Ritalin. Heroin. Coffee. Nicotine. Sex. Adrenaline. Designer clothing. Sanrio. Fetish porn. All potential addictions.

Society has given us boring and perfunctory work, increasing amounts of leisure time and a growing number of entertainments and distractions. We almost don't stand a chance. The downtime needs to be filled, and damnit, addictions of all sorts are often the easiest way to do so. They constitute a great societal attack against boredom, against the malaise of living in a late-capitalist economy.

But, to quote Brad Pitt in "Fight Club," "the things we own ends up owning us." Same goes for addictions.

I'm not advocating an overthrow of the system. Frankly, I'm too lazy and I would miss Showtime's "Queer As Folk." But the first step to recovery is always admitting you have a problem. Thus I state: I'm a TV addict, and, if my nonexistent wife and kids are reading this, I know I can do better.