Tonight my television will go fuzzy as analog signals are switched off across the country. My wife Kitty and I don’t necessarily have anything against TV, but for some reason we just didn’t scurry to get our converter box when the coupon arrived in the mail. Eventually it expired and we made no move to order another one.

From a report about the switch in today’s New York Times:

According to Nielsen, about 2.8 million homes are completely unready for the transition, despite an onslaught of TV ads about the impending change. Another 9.5 million homes are partially unready, meaning that they may have upgraded some of their TV sets, but not all of them.

So as of tonight, I will rely solely on internet and DVD for my media consumption. It’s not that big of a shift. I’ve been watching on-line for awhile now (I’m a big fan of the Spelling action classics on Hulu) and most of the programs that I care about can be streamed on demand into my living room. So it’s not as if the networks will be losing my attention, but the advertisers will be losing some eyes.

I’m curious how many people in the country have a similar apathy towards the switch. In many respects, I see allowing my television to go dark as a good thing. I suspect more books will be read, and less post work calories consumed while under the soothing mental anesthetic of the Simpsons-Family Guy-Live @ 7-Simpsons wave. Also, maybe I’ll exercise more instead of sitting my fat ass on the couch and stuffing truffle salted popcorn into my maw while watching the latest Frontline depression fest on OPB.

It’s incredibly easy to turn television into the villain, but I’m also aware that I’m the one making the choice to vegetate in front of the tube. It might turn out that the only difference between my media consumption habits tomorrow as compared to today, is that I’ll be watching a smaller screen and using the buffer time to prep another batch of nachos.

Let’s hope that’s not the case.

How are you dealing with the switch? Are you switching?