1.
It is difficult to escape the influence of television.
If you fit
the  statistical
averages, by the age of 20 you will have been exposed
to at least 20 000 hours of television. You can add 10,
000 hours for each decade you have lived after the age
of 20. The only things Americans do more than watch television
are work and sleep.
2.
Calculate for a moment what could be done with even a
part of those hours. Five thousand hours, I am told, are
what a typical college undergraduate spends working on
a bachelor's degree. In 10000 hours you could have learned
enough to become an astronomer or engineer. You could
have learned several languages fluently. If it appealed
to you, you could be reading Homer in the original Greek
or Dostoyevsky
in Russian. If it didn't, you could have walked around
the world and written a book about it.
3.
The trouble with television is that it discourages
concentration. Almost anything interesting and rewarding
in life requires some constructive,
consistently applied effort. The dullest, the least gifted
of us can achieve things that seem miraculous
to those who never concentrate on anything. But television
encourages us to apply no effort. It sells us instant
gratification.
It
diverts
us only to divert, to make the time pass without pain. |
