The Peak

TV is turning us into idiots

By Jonathon Van Maren

I read something amusing, the other day. It was an Internet news article asking the ominous question “Is Foreign TV destroying our Culture?”

Are you kidding me?

Television has become, in the words of one wise man, a “barren wasteland.” I’m not just pointing out the fact that television shows seem incapable of discussing anything but sex and violence, I’m talking about how television has turned our society into a bunch of slack-jawed, illiterate, uncreative idiots who need to be entertained constantly.

And not intelligent entertainment such as, say, reading a book that might actually enhance our vocabulary or make us think a bit, but passive entertainment, where we sit in front of a blue flickering screen in a daze letting the warm sludge of nothingness pass over us.

And it keeps getting worse — a TIME Magazine study conducted over a decade ago stated that your average kid will have watched approximately 5,000 hours of television by the time he or she enters first grade, and around 19,000 hours by the time they graduate — this being far more time than they ever spend in class. Remember when kids used to climb trees and fool around outside?

With these revelations, I have my own doomsday announcement: television is the root of most of society’s problems. Kids are getting consistently lower grades — Yale psychologist Jerome Singer discovered that “kids who are heavy TV watchers tend to be less well informed, more restless, and poorer students.”

Their attention span is relatively short — how do you expect to keep their attention with boring stuff like social studies, when they just watched a dozen people get shot up, before they came to class? Dozens of studies show that young people will (surprise!) often try to re-enact things they see their heroes do on TV or in movies.

Skyrocketing obesity rates? Yeah, TV has nothing to do with that. I hear reaching for the remote 14 times an hour can be strenuous. Increase in young teenage pregnancies and STDs? The fact that most TV shows can’t last four minutes without sexual innuendo or sex acts might have something to do with that.

In that vein, the next time an English professor asks if the class has read a classic, and some moron says, “I think I watched the movie,” I’m going to lose all hope in human intelligence. Cinematography and literature are two completely different art forms, which tell a story two completely different ways.

Films or TV shows cannot capture the beauty of literature. It’s too bad more people haven’t realized this, because now books that were once standard reading around second grade are studied in university classes and guess what? Ninety per cent of the students haven’t even read them yet. Literature, it turns out, isn’t as entertaining as watching a movie. And people wonder why we’re getting dumber.

Even TV’s one redeeming feature, news, has turned into a joke. Remember when Barbara Walters was a respected journalist who interviewed distinguished intellectuals and world leaders?

When did it become newsworthy to interview Britney Spears on who took her virginity or some weeping woman on how Ellen DeGeneres broke her heart? Good grief. I feel so enlightened I may throw up.

That’s why I was so amused by the above-mentioned news article. Foreign TV shows aren’t destroying our culture — television has already been destroying our ability to think intelligently for years.

And it really doesn’t make a difference whether the television show you’re watching is a foreign subtitled one or an English one — it’s the same garbage.

Here’s a suggestion to the worried authors of that news story: if you’re really that concerned about our culture, turn off the tube and grab a book. You might learn something.