The Wonders And Woes Of Dish Network TV

By Roseann Hudson


If peanuts have been dubbed as food for the brain, television is its chewing gum. Television is generally harmless for those who already are fluent in reading and who consume its contents moderately. But make no mistake, that seemingly old household technology staple is still that thing that causes obesity and reduces brain activity, flattening our perspective instead of widening it.

We have moved on from monochromatic televisions to HD color, which is why people who watch black and white TV are more prone to dream in monochrome. We have traded broadcast TV for satellite Dish Network Las Vegas ones. We added Internet to our boob tubes so we can binge on shows, known as the Netflix effect, the perfect food for either show connoisseur or television addict.

The social aspects of television has long been ignored, and we are the clueless victims. It has long widened the gap between our real selves and ideal selves with all the social archetypes and erroneous role modeling. And the major platform for propaganda has always been television.

When we use the Internet, we are actively seeking content when we hit the search bar. Television, on the other hand, feeds us information all the same even if we are just switching channels as we can still see and hear whatever there is that is being shown, not to mention all the advertisements regularly bombarded into our faces. Most of the things we purchase right now as basic needs, we do because of advertising campaigns that have brainwashed us into thinking we need those things.

It is not just television programs that should be blamed for the Cultivation Hypothesis but also the impact of the advertising. By creating needs we do not really need, we have fallen victim to the the wrong side of consumerism, but that is how capitalism works, and it had worked for a very long time. Like the story behind deodorant. We have those things in our grocery lists, but before the marketing campaign that made us ashamed of our natural scent when we perspire, people did not really mind wetness and odor.

How prejudiced we are when it comes to gender, race, and other things will also depend on how much we take in the archetypes shown on TV. When we watch, our minds usually turn off that thing that separates reality from fiction. Take for example the Stepford wife stereotype, and the way the past decades portrayed women as childish, immature, and very submissive to men. Fortunately, more programs are abandoning the patriarchal, misogynist way and have more gender equal shows.

Bad news is also bad news. A psychological study has found out that watching negative news alters our mood and fills us with anxiety and worry. It is not just because we have seen something terrible that is happening in the real world, but because of the even cruel tendency of bad news to be sensationalized, and thus, exaggerated enough to cause stressful effects.

Those are just for adults. For infants and children, it is more harmful such that it prohibits the development of cognition in children under two years old. It also shortens their attention span and are also triggers for ADD.

In moderation, however, the boob tube also has benefits, such as its painkilling properties when babies watch cartoons and its ability to solve loneliness according to the Social Surrogacy theory. The evil is not in the box per se. Just like we must not believe everything we read in books, the same principle applies when we consume the brain chewing gum.




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