Contrary to how so many teachers, authors, and model students think, I feel that TV is a wonderful thing. It's important, entertaining, and clever. It's nothing surprising, though, that when we were in school, teachers talked about TV like how it's the worst thing ever, how it dumbs you down, takes away your life, and so on. From time to time, I'd read paragraphs in novels about how TV is bad and books are good. And then obviously, in order to please their favourite teachers/mentors/parents/whatever, "model students" would pretend that they agree.
TV is good. It projects fantasies into the minds of the unimaginative or the lazy (ie. movies/dramas), breaks down information into concise bits so audiences don't get bogged down by details (ie. news), announces stuff efficiently (ie. ads), creates conversation (ie. reality TV, dramas, current affair, infotainment, docus), serves as platforms for greater things (ie. competitions, charity programmes, talk shows), and so much more. How would anything replace that? Then again, how would anything replace anything?
That said, there is another camp of people that is so obsessed with TV that they let it take over majority of their free time. I'm talking about how Sally goes home, washes up, and then immediately switches it on and starts flipping through netflix or fushion or whatever. And you may think this happens mostly to children, teenagers, or young adults, but sometimes I think middle-age adults are more susceptible to it.
Sally has been consumed by TV. Why not? It's such a wonderful thing. She gets to watch other people's lives - lives that are better than hers, - gets to enter intriguing worlds of medieval chaos, gets to feel the excitement of the participants racing around China, and exercise her critical thinking in figuring out who is plotting against who in the latest period drama she is watching. There is no longer a need to figure out how to spend the weekends, no longer a need to step under the sweltering sun to watch how the world has changed in the span of years, and no longer a need to spend money on other things that makes her happy. TV is everything.
Except, Sally doesn't realise TV is poison. A little of it is wonderful - makes you feel all light-headed and free, having been brought to a better world. But too much of it, and it takes over and crush you from everywhere - the front, the back, the sides, the inside. TV tricks you into thinking you're thinking while it numbs your brain and lulls you into addiction; it tugs on your leash when you decide to go somewhere else; it keeps you from seeing the actual world, rather than the cropped and filtered ones it chooses to show.
TV is a mass hypnosis. It overwhelms your senses by pushing your sight and hearing to its limits before suggesting and suggesting. It repeats patterns over and over till it becomes reality. It readjusts your paradigms so your wavelength become its producers'. It seduces you so you detach yourself from a less ideal reality and in turn pulls you back into the web. It manipulates your desires with rhythms of highs and lows, with the highs placed at the end of each episode so your interest never dies - "one more episode" is a lie because it is what writers are banking on.
And if you never realise it, you'll fall deeper and lose sight of how it destroys your life. You stop thinking or remembering. You become stale. Your conversations become emptier. Your internet becomes slower. Your hearing worsens. Your eyesight dulls. You find yourself becoming less equipped to deal with life. You find yourself dependent.
Life is difficult, and TV sometimes seems like an easier way to "live". Don't let it be. TV is a wonderful thing, but it is poison. Take it in moderation.
Labels: family, preachy, rants