roman’s blog

“The omnipresent box sitting somewhere in our homes, workplaces, and just about everywhere else has a much greater hold on our lives than we think.” – Corbett Trubey from The Argument Against TV

Television sets can be found practically anywhere today. With the average American youth spending around 1,500 hours watching television each year; it is impossible to say that the vast quantities of consumers are not in any way unsusceptible to being influenced by the “box” in their decisions, lifestyle, or thinking (Trubey 777). Little over half a century ago television used to be, “an experimental form of image transmission…” (Trubey 777) but today it is a full fledged market and is the ultimate in long, passive entertainment. Today television plays a major roll in how we get our information. We no longer feel the need to read to keep up; not to say we have abandoned that practice entirely, but we are drawn to its sugar-coated and surreal interpretation of the real world. With the satisfaction that comes in watching one’s favorite TV broadcast people are just sort of letting the television live their dream and not vice versa; doing everything they ever wished to try through the television set. Not all those hours spent were entirely useless, but on account that nine years of the average American are spent watching TV, one might wonder, if a better use of those years could have been made. You could say that functioning in a fast-paced society such as ours would be a burden without television, but turning on the television it is more likely that you’ll find almost everything on there to be a: game show, reality show,   a TV drama… just to name a few that we don’t necessarily need to survive. Even the news channels can be slightly deceiving, each one pushing its own agenda, sometimes you may be getting half-truths, news twisted by the media, or complete lies. Looking at the bigger picture and how television as come to affect the nation as a whole I see that some things are definitely changing and I can attribute some of those changes to television. It seems as if too many people are biased on some things they clearly know nothing about. They say stupider things about important issues and careless about decisions being made in politics and their surroundings, which could possibly affect everyone’s future.