Television: Elimination Versus Limitation

Both Marie Winn's book, The Plug-In Drug, and Jerry Mander's book, Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television, acknowledge and explore the detrimental effects of watching television. Mander looks at the downfalls of the medium in general, while Winn focuses her attention on television's effects on developing young children. Each author uses different means to come to different conclusions, but their themes, the extreme negativity of television, are the same.

Mander, who has extensive experience in the television production industry as a successful advertiser, breaks his book down into four separate claims that support the idea that television is harmful. He argues that television creates a mediation of experience, through which people only witness the world, rather than partake in it. Television, he says, acts as an intermediary between the viewer and the world. He also cites multiple studies that support the idea that the act of watching television produces adverse health effects. These health effects are broad in range and severity and include things as addiction-like states, decreased intellectual power, lack of energy, negative reactions to artificial light, unintended hypnosis, suppression of imagination, and many others. Mander also makes the argument that television is run by a monetarily elite few, which limits the ideas expressed in the television programming, influencing people to think in a particular manner before exposing them to possible alternatives. Lastly, Mander claims that television is biased and based entirely around advertising. The conclusion can then be drawn that television intends not to entertain, as many see it, but to sell specific products that may or may not be an effective use of one's income.

Winn focuses more on the effects of television on children. Most importantly, she points out that the time children spend watching television is in itself a lack of time spent partaking in other more beneficial activities such as reading, playing, doing schoolwork, being outdoors, forming friendships, and fostering familial relationships. She argues that television has drug-like attributes and serves to foster addictions to the device. She cites evidence that children who are highly addicted to television are, on average, less imaginative, in worse physical shape, less academically inclined, and less socially disposed than children who watch little or no television. In young children, watching television can impair the ability to distinguish between fiction and reality, stunting their cognitive growth. She also strongly emphasizes that the actual act of watching television is detrimental to childhood development; the content of the programming does not make television better or worse.

The most important recurring theme in both Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television and The Plug-In Drug is that television serves to alter one's perception of realty through the removal of the real world from one's life. Children and adults alike watch television and come to accept what they see as what the real world is truly like; through watching television, the need to experience reality is replaced by the ease of merely witnessing, and what is being witnessed is rarely reality. The prevalence of television in society distorts reality for all. Children who grow up around television tend to attempt to relate what they see to their own lives, never drawing barriers between what is real and what is made up for television. When these children later form the general adult population, the society as a whole looses its basis in reality and holds a skewed view of the world.

Both authors also touch on society's dependence on television. Mander points out that we look to television to decide what products to buy and what opinions to hold. Winn brings up the idea that parents often use television as a pseudo babysitter to win themselves a few minutes of free time. This dependence on the technology of television reflects quite closely the story "The Machine Stops" by E. M. Forster, where the entire human population exists internally within a machine that governs their lives, a machine through which they experience reality and all their needs are fulfilled. When that machine breaks down, their civilization follows suit. Television is more and more becoming that machine; we are so dependent on it that its destruction would significantly alter our way of life and our way of looking at the world.

The most prevalent difference between the two theses is the suggested solution for the examined problem. Mander suggests that television be completely eliminated from the human experience. He claims that the device is far past the point where it could be reformed, and must be eradicated. Winn's solution is less radical and more practical for the everyday American. She suggests limiting the viewing of television, especially in families. Limiting can actively be done through any number of systems, such as limiting the days of a week that television can be turned on or the number of hours a day that is acceptable viewing time. She argues that by limiting television, people can still get the relaxation they crave, while constraining the power of television to do harm. She also makes the point that when television is limited, its hold on one's life is released, and its elimination becomes a more realistic option.

While Mander and Winn clearly hold the same general opinions about television and both make sound, detailed arguments about the technology's disadvantages, it is important to note that television has certainly made its way into modern life. It is because of this that Winn's solution holds a higher probability for success. While television definitely has its vastly injurious effects, the limitation, rather than elimination, of television provides a feasible and pragmatic resolution.

Bibliography
The Plug-In Drug by Marie Winn
"The Machine Stops" by E. M. Forster
Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television by Jerry Mander