Kill Your TV

There are many eras in the history of human civilization and each of them has its own name. An era can be named after important events, personalities or inventions. The era in which we live today can have different names but if we would like to find the best name for it, we would probably call it “The Era of Television”.

Jim Morrison, a famous singer and poet once wrote in his poem – “Do you know we are ruled by T.V.”. Many of the researches made on the influence of the television support this opinion.

First, I have to describe the state in which people are while watching television. Watching TV is a passive event. Children and also adults remain completely immobile and quiet while viewing the box. All attention is given to the images. Both mind and body are passive (called an alpha state) allowing people to concentrate on the vast, and often fast, array of bright pictures. People are just sitting in front of that thing, receiving the pictures, images and information of different quality and in different quantity but usually these are made to help the people leave their real lives and to enter an imaginary world where everything seems to be perfect. The more and more people watch TV the more and more they become cut from reality and they can get lost in the space of television, which has no borders. Speaking about the perfection of television, many psychologists speak about “The Beautiful People Syndrome”. In a very simple way it means that TV influences the way we view others. Of course we know that television is not real. Everyone knows that. But despite of it, the world of television effect our daily lives, influences our opinion of people and impacts our fashion, speech and social interaction.
After watching hours and hours of television imagery, those "Beautiful People" will become burned into our minds and then everyone wants to be one of the beautiful television people. For example the handsome, pretty, skinny and witty characters on the show "Friends" or "Ally McBeal" are more famous than writers, poets, and politicians and more important than teachers, policemen or firemen. These characters live the lives we all should live, and they don't even have to work that hard.
Another example of this syndrome is that in most of the cases if a man is not handsome and wealthy, he is not ideal. Any woman who is not bone-thin with a large chest certainly is below the standard.