Television Draft#2

In recent years, especially is the United States; laziness has become a growing epidemic. One of the causes of this plague is television, a box that captures our full attention without fail. People become obsessed with the lives of celebrities, imaginary love, wars, and luxuries. Televisions, today, detracts from the thinking process; it does this by distracting people from their responsibilities, it slows the search for information, and draws people into materialistic society.

By appealing to the viewer through theirs emotions, television draws people in so that they forget their duties. Programs are packed full of action, previously unknown sites, drama, and more either desirable or horrific worlds. These soap operas, sitcoms, and other shows spark our curiosity, makes laugh or cry, and they even relate to our everyday lives. Yet, when people get wrapped up in this form of entertainment many things can become neglected, and people can become focused on the lives of others, rather then their own life. It has also become a habit for some to schedule duties around their favorite programs, detracting from time in which they could be getting things done, such as work, exercising, or reading, actually using their brains. Some people have even been known to drive recklessly just to make it home in time for a program, neglecting their duties of the road and endangering everyone around them. Television fills time that could be used to exercise your brain, find a hobby or learn something new.

Basic knowledge and common sense aren’t developed if no initiative has been taken to understand and find new information. Even the search for new facts has slowed because of television. People no longer have to use time and to find the things that they need, it’s all just laid out for them. Yes there may be some beneficial points to this, but through the process of finding information people learn things they didn’t expect and develop skills that will help them in life. Beneficially, T.V. opens the population to information that they didn’t know they didn’t know, unveiling a wealth of knowledge that would have gone undiscovered. The shows that do this are some shows that air on the History Channel, The Discovery Channel, and other programs that may hold beneficial knowledge. Yet, these channels, though they may help in some ways, still pull people away from the library for example, and allow people to not have to work or use common sense to find this new intelligence. Other channels open the majority of people to what they believe they need, and these are usually the shows that are the most popular.

These “needs” are crammed into this country, so that citizens change their values from accomplishment, wisdom, and happiness to money and beauty. T.V. is full of commercials, infomercials, and subliminal messages, which make the majority of the population, believe that they “need” objects, money, and sex to fill our desires. Though these shallow requests look good on the surface, what people are forgetting is the way that the accomplished obtain these things. People who have obtained the desires, so vividly projected on screens, have set themselves apart from the couch potatoes, by taking the time and self will to work towards their dreams. The public needs to understand that while people sit and watch their favorite show, society in slyly placing advertisement and shallow needs into their conscience unbeknownst to them.

All in all television does detract from the thinking process because it doesn’t require you to think. T.V. is just there, a short lived happiness nothing substantial to offer. It has been proven to reduce productivity and promote laziness. These consequences are the last thing our public needs. This country is literate and intelligent enough, to be able to ignore television and find out the things we need to know, by ourselves and with out further assistance.