With the sophisticated revolutions and commercialization made from the past decades, the television has now become a necessity and is affordable to everyone. This can be proven with the fact that more than ninety per cent of households in modern countries have at least one television set (Sharif 1999). Moreover, according to the UK 2000 Time Use Survey, most of the full time workers regardless of male or female spent their leisure time most on watching television. Due to it, the availability of this invention now has raised many issues regarding its pros and cons. However, I strongly believe that the television viewing brings the negative effects more than the positive effects to humankind. For instance, the television viewing can cause poor behavioural development among children, poor thinking skills and sedentary lifestyle.
First of all, the television viewing can cause poor behavioural development among children. Since the children are on the stage of forming their own identities, they are likely to follow and behave like what have been portrayed by the programs they watch. The violence depicted programs are often broadcasted and the children may continually become desensitized to violence after watching them. More than that, there have been instance where children have put on Superman costumes and injured themselves while imitating the character. This can be disastrous especially when it comes to the extent that the children try to impersonate the stereotype characters in the movies (Sharif 1999).
Apart from that, the television viewing can also lead to poor thinking skills. It misguides the youngsters to have perspective that the problems can be easily solved. They become frustrated and give up easily when encountering some complex situations in real life (Sharif 1999). Moreover, according to Dr Geraldine, watching television is a passive activity, thus putting obstacles for children in developing the vivid imaginative skills to create fictitious characters, situations, and make-believe words, skills which are important in nurturing problem solving and organizational ability. This is why heavy viewers are associated with the lowest achiever at school. Besides that, when the television is on, it is also difficult to stay focus on things like homework as the fascinating programs can be very distractive (Leigh 2001).
Moreover, television triggers sedentary lifestyle which is very unhealthy. Prolonged period in front of the television means the children are not physically active (Sharif 1999). More than that, many find it easier to flick between channels to search for something interesting and this can be very time wasting which eats into the period set aside for homework or exercise. Some families even have their meals in front of television making communication among family members to be difficult. The incident becomes even worse if they indulged in with junk food which in turn may lead to obesity and related diseases in the future (Rutherford 2002).
In a nutshell, invention of the television does pose the negative effects like poor behavior development among children, poor thinking skill and sedentary lifestyle. Human ourselves in the end will have to bear the costs of enjoying the conveniences being invented indiscriminately. For this, I firmly agree that the television viewing brings the negative effects more than the positive effect it brings to human kind
No comments:
Post a Comment