TV is Bad for You

A boy sits at home waiting for his big brother to come home from school. He hears the door shut and a backpack fall to the ground. The boy looks at the clock and sees that it’s around 3:20, so his older brother should be home from school by now. The boy goes into the living room where he sees his brother’s eyes fixated on the TV. The boy asks his brother if he wanted to play some catch outside, “No thanks, I’m fine.” What was odd was that his older brother loved to play catch with him. “How about we shoot some hoops?” His brother replies, “No, maybe some other time.” As he says this his little brother notices that his eyes are glued to the TV screen. Is television so addictive that it makes everything else look unattractive? According to author Marie Winn television is considered a “plug-in drug.” Although watching excessive television is not as serious as drugs or alcohol in the sense of the lethalness to the human body, TV can have many effects in and of itself. According to various authors, television has made our reality seem nothing more than second best and make children become more violent.

First, one can say that television has made everyday reality seem nothing more than second best. Out in the “real world” emotions such as anxiety, hopelessness, stress, and countless others consume our minds. Who would want to constantly be surrounded by any of those problems? For example, let’s say you just came home from a hard day of work, so why not flip the television on and not worry about any of those problems? Winn states that, “The television experience allows the participant to blot out the real world and enter into a pleasurable and passive mental state” (Winn 21). For some people in modern society life without a televisi...

... middle of paper ...

...n Drug: Television, Children & the Family. , NY: Viking Penguin.

2. Hardebeck, Daniel J. The Kill Your Television Website. (http://othello.localaccess.com/hardebeck/) Feb 23, 1998.

3. Jerry, Mander. Review of Jerry Mander’s Four Arguments For the Elimination of Television. (http://www.netreach.net/people/kaufman/Jerry.Mander.html) Feb 21, 1998.

4. Stevens, D. (2005, March 25). Thinking Outside the Idiot Box. In Slate.com. Retrieved March 20, 2011

5. Dove, R. (n.d.). Loose Ends. In Google Books. Retrieved March 20, 2011, from http://books.google.com/books?id=goVB8U5ruwoC&pg=PA99&lpg=PA99&dq It's+not+that+we+confuse+television+with+reality.+But+that+we+prefer+it+to+ eality-the+manageable+struggle+resolved+in+twenty-six+minu

6. Scheibe, C. (n.d.). Television in the Lives of Children. Retrieved March 20, 2011, from http://www.ithaca.edu/cretv/research/tv_lives.html