Why I Hate Cable TV By:Mia Bailey Lots of people love watching television. I know I do. But sometimes, there are things that make us feel uneasy, and even scared. Now, the events that take place in this narrative are one hundred percent TRUE, and I unfortunately witnessed them. You might already have heard of the TV broadcast hijacking in Seneca, South Carolina; the story’s gained pretty wide currency on the Internet, and part of the broadcast is available on youtube, assuming it hasn’t been taken down for whatever reason. For the uninitiated, the Seneca hijacking is one of the lesser-known broadcast signal intrusions. It was big news here, but the nation news media barely touched on it. Anyway, I’ve decided to jot down my impressions of the whole thing, even though other eyewitnesses have already described it more eloquently than I could. …show more content…
No one else was around. After watching the umpteenth Law and Order rerun, I got bored and started channel surfing. A couple minutes later, I stumbled onto this shitty public access channel where, bizarrely enough, my old high school Latin teacher was reciting a poem while wearing this dorky three-cornered hat. I watched for a few minutes and had a good laugh—I remembered him as a pretty serious guy, not the sort of person who’d embarrass himself in public like this—when suddenly there was this static-y crackle and the screen cut to this multi-colored test
Imagine, if you will, a time that seemed innocent... almost too innocent. Imagine a nation under whose seemingly conformist and conservative surface dramatic social changes were brewing, changes as obvious as integration and as subtle as fast food. And imagine, if you will, a radical television show that scrutinized, criticized, and most importantly, publicized these changes, making the social turmoil of a nation apparent to its post-world war, self-contented middle-class citizens. But what if this television show was not as it appeared? What if it masqueraded as simple science fiction, and did not reveal its true agenda until viewers took a closer look? Let us examine how such a television program can become a defining force in the culture of a nation, a force that remains just as powerful almost forty-five years after it first appeared. Let us investigate the secrets of... The Twilight Zone.
In the world today watching television is so addictive that everything else looks unattractive. The author argues that television is not lethal as drugs and alcohol but it can have many effects such as children getting more violent and reality seem second best. Every person lives are filled with emotions including anxiety, depression, and stress so after long hard work day the best medicine is to turn the television on and not to worry about anything. For example, I usually drive from site to site to take care of business. So when I return home from work I will sit on my couch and turn the television on and flick the channel until I fall to sleep. As Marie Winn describes, "the television experience allows the participant to blot out the real world and e...
In “Wires and Lights in a Box,” the author, Edward R. Murrow, is delivering a speech on October 15, 1958, to attendees of the Radio-Television News Directors Association. In his speech, Murrow addresses how it is his desire and duty to tell his audience what is happening to radio and television. Murrow talks about how television insulates people from the realities in the world, how the television industry is focused on profits rather than delivering the news to the public, and how television and radio can teach, illuminate, and inspire.
In an article ' The Plug-In Drug ' the author Marie Winn discusses the bad influence of television on today's society. Television is a ' drug ' that interfere with family ritual, destroys human relationships and undermines the family.
One of the largest “booms” that this country has witnessed is in the area of the ultimate “entertainment” source, the television. The growth in popularity of the use of the television is harming Americans in every aspect of their lives,
The problems presented on TV are only programs. Viewers are not paying attention to the real-life connections that programs like 24 show. Stevens argues that “[I]t isn’t a fictional program’s connection to real-life… events like torture and racial profiling one of the “social relationships” we should be paying attention to?” (296). Instead of doing that, the audience is focusing more on what it is going on screen, and they do not analyze the connection and the impact that those programs have in the society. Stevens pays more attention on the impact that generalizations of people have in society, on the contrary, Johnson focuses more on the structure that can help viewers become
Television has long been a part of American culture. From its conception until today there have been people who believe that television is a waste of time and energy and there have been those in the opposite camp who believe that television should be a part of every American life. There is also a middle ground of people who watch television to keep informed on what’s happening in the world as well as entertained by the latest sitcom, or more popularly today, reality show.
Would you ever eat a plate of worms? Or perhaps stay trapped in a box and let rats crawl all over you. If that is not intense enough for you maybe eating buffalo testicles would be more pleasing. These are just some of the horrific stunts television is showing on a variety of shows. Ask yourself the question is TV really good or bad? There have been articles debating this subject such as Steven Johnson’s "Watching TV Makes You Smarter" who is pro watching TV and encourages it. He feels that it gets peoples brains to work and they draw some sort of connection to the people on the show. Then there is Dana Stevens who writes an article called "Thinking Outside the Idiot Box" who makes it seem as if she is also against watching TV, then at the end of the article she says, "....watching television is definitely a smart thing to do- I get paid for it"(Graff 234). She is a big supporter of TV Turnoff Week and thinks that turning off the television would not make a person any dumber. This gives me the impression she may be neutral about TV only because watching it, is her source of income. There was however one article that stood out to me. That was "Reality Television: Oxymoron" by George F. Will. He is definatly against television. He thinks that some shows have gone too far as to what they portray as entertainment. Will feels as if these shows are degrading our society. Reading Will’s article, it made me think about what kind of extremes networks are willing to go to as the competition becomes more fierce to be number one.
There are many reasons to be concerned about violence. Television violence is more frequent then real violence. Television violence spares the views the suffering of the victim and the disorder of the killer. By the time a child is the age of 18, they will see 115,000 violent acts on television. (Hefzallah 88) An eleven-year-old child reported, “I was scared when I saw Friday the 13th. Whenever the girl went into the water and Jason stuck a knife in her and all this blood was in the water-I got real scared.” (Abelman 28) Robert Singer voiced:
Presently 98% of the households in the United States have one or more televisions in them. What once was regarded as a luxury item has become a staple appliance of the American household. Gone are the days of the three channel black and white programming of the early years; that has been replaced by digital flat screen televisions connected to satellite programming capable of receiving thousands of channels from around the world. Although televisions and television programming today differ from those of the telescreens in Orwell’s 1984, we are beginning to realize that the effects of television viewing may be the same as those of the telescreens.
I agree with Marie Winn 100%, and I think she does have a valid point. Television is a major addition in society and people are so blind-sighted by it that they don’t even realize that they’re being hypnotized into a trance. Television is brainwashing the minds of everyone, and there is no stop to it. It’s mainly up to the person who is watching the television to decide to turn it off, without having any regrets about it.
In conclusion, TV show is not as terrible as we imagined. It is a sort of double-edged sword that has both good side and bad side. It can give us a bad influence as well as bring us a lot of things to learn from.
Television is the most powerful medium the world has ever seen. Never before has it been possible to communicate and so strongly influence millions of people at the same moment right in their own homes. But its misuse has been felonious, and society is paying an increasing price (Langone, 1984).
Since the television was invented in 1924, news and current affairs programs have surly become one of our main media sources. With this in mind, reporters and stations alike are able to manipulate their audiences through a variety of techniques, to make them believe a representation of reality as opposed to the true fact. This is evident in the current affairs story “Video Game Violence” and the standard news story “Music Video Ban”. These similar stories both originated from Channel Nine and represent violence in society’s youth today, stating children are at risk if exposed to such material. Through a selection of techniques, the audience is lured into supporting the told story and agreeing with the general attitudes promoted.
Television has become one of the major entertainment providers in our modern life. It sits in the living room of about almost every home in the world and it is the one thing that most people like to come home to after a long day of work or school. Not only does it give us something to laugh or get scared at but it also provides us with valuable information about what is happening around our local community and around different places in the world. But, as good as this sounds, Television may be affecting us without even realizing it. Being one of the major distractors in today 's society, it gets us attached to its content in which a lot of people spend a lot of their time watching. Being thus, watching too