Blog#6

Name: Wei Cao (Kevin)

March 5, 2017

ENG 100

Dr. Vince Fitzgerald

Blog#6

    In our daily life, newspaper, TV, internet all become daily necessities. For decades, they squandered this cognitive surplus watching television. It is true that watching TV can kill time, and it becomes the most simple and effective way to obtain the fresh information. However, people usually will only pay attention to appearance; we don’t know that Watching TV have subtle influence our thinking, culture, ideas, aesthetics and so on. Think about that our behavior is already be affected.

    The article Life According to TV, written by Harry F. Waters, still has a high research value in the 21st century. The Waters’ argument is mostly right over twenty years old. Watching TV can have massive influences on our behavior without our awareness. To achieve high ratings, television program producers must explore some exciting elements. For examples, compare two good rating TV show, either like a warm, American-made cartoon full of indestructible characters or like a dreary live-action film full of bloody violence. Those TV shows bring about extremely large effect for teenagers and distort the value of teenagers. This point of view happens to have the same view with Harry F. Waters that “Forty-six percent of heavy viewers who live in cities rated their fear of crime “‘very serious”’ as opposed to 26 percent for light viewers.”(Crime P127) From what I have mentioned above, we can see clearly that violence on TV has great influence on youngsters’ behavior that over watching television violence possibly causes an increase of adolescent aggression, and aggression is related with emotional reaction evoked by watching television violence.

However, TV show as a kind of public life has wide-ranging and long-term effects of the culture forms, which can spread appreciation for culture and language. Just as the popular saying goes, “every coin has two sides”. We can’t ignore the TV brings us positive side, which can lead more people to study from this. What we need is to teach teenagers to distinguish between right and wrong. When people have the rich spirit world, judge right or wrong, and resist temptation, can reduce the influence of TV on them.

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