Addicted to television

Hey bloggers!

Have you ever been in a room having a nice conversation, or even a boring one, and can’t stop yourself from periodically glancing over to the television that is on in the background? Everyone has, you can’t deny it, it is something that just easily draws our attention and is able to keep it for long periods of time.

Some scientist may classify this habit as being obsessive whereas others simply call it part of our human behaviour. We get distracted easily and have a hard time focusing on just one thing. It’s part of our nature. But sometimes we go overboard on things and turn them into an addiction. Watching television is a choice and one we regularly favour, in which case watching it too much could be considered an addiction. No one has to drink alcohol for example, we simply do it for enjoyment, but there are some people that get overly attached to it and become addicted.  This can happen with anything and anyone and seems to have happened with our society and the television. In the past twenty years we have gotten very dependent on the television as a pastime and turned it into an addiction. 

Now is this point still relevant today, that is something each of you may want to think about.

I believe the argument that people are addicted to TV is still relevant today, whether in the same context or different, it is still present.

People always want to be lazy, sit around doing nothing for a little while and television gives them a perfect excuse. It’s a way to zone out the world and turn into the beloved couch potato. And sometimes, that perfect excuse can turn into an everyday occurrence that then becomes an addiction. I know that is a very drastic way of looking at it but the Oxford dictionary states an addiction as being, “the condition of being abnormally dependent on some habit, practise or to something that is psychologically or physically habit-forming.” And watching television has in some ways become just that. 

But whether our addiction has changed with time or is still how it used to be, it is still present in our everyday lives.

In class we read an essay on television addiction and there are some very valid points in it about how we don’t have the motivation to stop watching. It is very true because we can sit on the couch and watch pointless show after pointless show without caring. It takes serious self-control and self-regulation to snap out of the trance we put ourselves in and get back to the real world. If it was as easy as we wish it to be, we wouldn’t have this problem. But the problem is also that we as a species are drawn to the newest pieces of technology like a dog is drawn to a bone.

“Oh! A new video game! Let’s go play it for hours and hours until we beat the whole game.”

   

We get so distracted by these new toys and lack the self-control it takes to regulate our consumption that they have turned into addiction-like pastimes.

As our class read the essay on the addiction to television, we had a long discussion on whether this point is still relevant today. We came to the conclusion that there are many points for either side of the debate but overall they all end with society today being obsessive over some sort of electronic. Whether it is television, a gaming console or simply their phone, everyone has a piece of technology that they cannot seem to put down and walk away from.