anil

Tuesday, September 11, 2012

Life before screens

A recent report suggests that modern urbanites spend a greater and greater portion of their lives in front of their TV screens. According to the A.C. Nielsen Co., the average American watches more than 4 hours of TV each day. That means that in a 65-year life, that person will have spent 9 years glued to the tube! 

I remember a time when our life was bereft of screens - no TV, computers, Ipads or iphones. Heck, I even remember the time when we had no radio. It was 1948 and the three of us kids were pestering our father to buy a radio. Mindful of its potential for distraction, he extracted a solemn promise from each of us that we would only listen to the radio for the "Children's Hour" and the news! The TV and computer screens entered our lives only decades later and when they came it was years before our lives became entangled with spending hours before these pesky screens that took away a larger and larger parts of our waking lives.

These screens brought the world to us with all its splendor and mysteries and entertainment. A click provided access to the world's knowledge and to words of the wisest statesmen. These soon became our reservoir of knowledge, music and soon even movies. But even in its wonders lay a trap for our minds.

The biggest trap of watching too much TV is that it could become a safe way to escape your own life instead of looking at it square in the eye. People who gossip have the same problem. Their lives aren’t interesting enough so they feel the need to know everybody else’s business and spread the word to whoever will listen. The person who watches television for hours on end is no different. They end up so wrapped up in the lives of others that it becomes their entire life.

Also when you watch TV, you’ll find that it does all the work FOR you. You don’t need to “create” in your mind like you do when reading. When you read, your brain has to use its imagination to come up with the smells, the tastes, the sounds, the pictures, and the feelings described in the book or article but when you watch TV, all of that is already done for you (at least the hearing and seeing part). If you ever wonder why your brain feels so “empty” after watching television, that’s exactly why. Your brain shuts off because it has no job to do. Use it or lose it indeed.

The fact is that TV can easily become the biggest time thief of all and yet, people don’t realize it. They don’t become indignant at the opportunities in life that they lose. It’s amazing how people take the time to buy the best security for their home so their precious belongings don’t get stolen, but when it comes to protecting their mind and their time, two of their biggest assets, the doors are wide open for easy pickings!
 Finally TV can be just as addictive as any illegal substance on the market today. It’s easily accessible, pleasurable, and makes you forget your troubles for the day.  This is the worst part of watching too much television. You watch one show and when it ends, the TV says “Coming up next…stay tuned for blah blah blah”, so you become curious, you watch it and you like it and BOOM, you add another rotation to your weekly TV schedule. Those hours add up and once you get vested in the shows, they’ve got you for life.
In recent years, the situation has become even worse with the advent of IPADs and cell phones. Indeed nearly a quarter of people now use these second screens while watching TV. If you add the computer screens and the smaller screens of IPADs and cellphones, I am guessing that those four hours per day will double or even triple. We are rapidly reaching a stage where people would prefer to do all transactions through screens big and small rather than directly. I am sure many of you have been in households where the entire family is sitting in the room but each one is glued to his or her own screen and the sound level in the room is zero as no body is talking to each other!
When it’s all said and done, in too many cases, watching so much of life on screens- television, IPAD, or cellphone- may provides a safe escape from looking at your own life, but just as surely it deteriorates the mind, makes one unproductive, and can lead to a dangerous addiction. 

A love of the screen can truly be one of the most dangerous drugs out there on the market today and the sad thing about it is, most people don't even realize it.

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