Television destroys humanity, individuality and sanity

Television is a scam and nobody should watch it, any of it. All those programs providing an activity for the bored, all the shows prompting people on couches to lean in and bring their hands to their mouths when drama drops, all those little dots making up the soft parades of shiny images - they're only vehicles to sell the products showcased in the commercials. Most often, the products being pushed are ideas, and this is dangerous because of the quality of the ideas.

TV is a for-profit enterprise. Networks are businesses. This is why cable news has destroyed journalism and MTV has destroyed both radio and music. The music is not designed to move your head but to move your body, which is a lot easier to accomplish. The faux-news programs want good ratings and high book sales, not to keep the public informed to better resist tyranny. They will air whatever keeps you tuning in, regardless of its truth or journalistic quality.

I read a book titled "Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television," written in the '70s by career advertising entrepreneur Jerry Mander. I'll admit that television has changed since the '70s, but a lot of its qualities remain the same. What struck me about the book was how the effects of television on the individual become more significant when applied to society at large. When you have an entire society spending more time watching television than doing anything else, things get scary.

Television usurps the individual's ability to construct individualized meaning. If this doesn't alarm your better judgment, it should. In this way, television becomes an authority, and the messages emanating from the tube are not questioned with the veracity they should be. This is how we get our loony pundits and the people who attend their "rallies" and parrot their nonsense.

Television land is about spectacles, because the non-spectacular doesn't get ratings. Oddly, the programming needs to be duller than the commercials, because if the commercials are duller than the programs, then the ads aren't as memorable. They don't work, and then companies pull their ads. Then the networks lose the majority of their funding and TV disappears. So the worst thing a network can do is air thought-provoking, interesting shows.

Mander ends his book by saying that television has so saturated American society with its presence that people can no longer imagine being without it. Today in the average American home, TVs are on for more than eight hours per day, they are watched for about four and a half hours per day and more TVs (2.73 per household) exist than people (2.55 per household), according to a 2006 Nielson report.

Humans are creatures of imitation. A person is the sum total of his or her experiences. Everything we see and hear gets internalized on some level. Because Americans now spend more time watching television than doing anything else, we start to act and speak and dress like the characters we see on TV. This, I believe, makes people less human. We become homogenized as our minds become processed and shaped in the same certain ways by the same forces. We start to become TV people.

TV people are not like human beings. They are designed. The boring parts of their lives are not on camera. They are hyper-clean and stylized. Their lives have soundtracks. Recordings of now-dead people clap and laugh at sitcom characters' otherwise lame, rehashed jokes.

But why make such a big deal about all the garbage oozing out of the idiot box? What's wrong with just vegging out in front of the tube after a long, stressful day and laughing at some schmo in a funny situation?

Watching television is a choice. You can choose to support this emotion-generating, image-implanting, literacy-destroying machine by watching your favorite shows and visiting their websites. You can choose to expose yourself to all the advertisements that screw with your body image and implant goals and archetypes and desires into your head and show you just what real men and single moms and flamboyant gays act like.

But then you're letting something else - not even someone else - tell you who you are and what you want and who you should become. And that's why television is the brainwasher. It prospers by rearranging people. And you can choose to turn it off.

John Hitzel is a senior communication and English major from St. Louis, Mo.