T.V.... Is it really what it seems?

Matt Munns
Period 4
March 30, 2008

T.V. in Our Lives

Oh my gosh! Where’s the remote? Turn it off! We all have had a situation like this before in our life, when we find out the program we are watching is not exactly what we should, or want to be watching. T.V. has been blamed for many things in this world, obesity, raised violence, but it really only presents half of the problem. All those problems that it does create probably fall under the category of bad programming.

It has happened to all of us, at one time or another; we have all seen something that we never want to see on T.V. So what do most people do about it? Thy normally just chose to leave it on and watch it until it is over. You could maybe say that the more people watch programs that aren’t necessarily clean in language, action, or dress; it starts to desensitize them to it. The first time they watch the show they may not really like it, but soon it becomes their favorite, they have become hooked, just like a drug. And once again some of us ask, “Are they going to let themselves do this?” and from the looks of things in the world now, they are.

Programs on T.V. today are seemingly rarely clean, or worth watching. Unfortunately programs in our day and age don’t seem to ever follow a plot, or a story line. This makes them seemingly dumb or stupid to watch because they don’t really want or need to go any where, because all they need is for you to watch. Television stations now would rather put something bad on T.V. than good because guess what we are supposedly more likely to watch? That’s right, the bad program. So you may ask “What exactly is a bad program?” Look at it like this; does it have bad language used excessively? Does it promote drugs? Is it in someway explicit? Or does it just promote sex, violence and other actions that seem to be O.K. for T.V. to program? If it has any of these characteristics, it should be considered unclean, especially the latter. In a way this leads to another problem the one the T.V. may be best known for.

T.V. is quite often blamed for physical characteristics in our world, mainly known as obesity. T.V. does promote people just sitting around doing nothing, but watching their screen, also known as in-activeness, and when people start to become inactive, they start to gain weight. It starts slowly at first, and they may not realize it, but soon their weight is just, well, out of control! This is what T.V. gets blamed for, and in a way it should, because it does promote this in-activeness, and it does have programs that do the same; but all it has really done is nullify our decision making skills enough that we soon become happier to be extremely large, than to get healthy, and active.

So look at it, what does your favorite program represent? How clean is it? This is something that we all should ask ourselves before we ever watch anything. But we normally don’t. So is it necessarily the T.V.’s fault? Is it the T.V.’s fault for giving us so much bad programming? Is it the T.V.’s fault for giving this country such a high obesity rate? That is only the tip of the iceberg, in the end it is all up to us. Whether or not we watch the bad shows, whether or not we decide to become extremely overweight, and eventually obese. In the end, it is all up to us to make the decision, so what do you chose?