Junkies have needles, TV addicts crave the remote
Television — how do we view it? Panacea for the empty hours between dinner and bedtime? Source of spellbinding entertainment? Whipping boy for the ills of civilization? All of the above? None of the above?
A recent article in Scientific American suggests another take on TV culture: its uncanny resemblance to drug addiction. Heavy viewers (or should we say “users”?) manifest almost all of the classic symptoms of substance dependence. Dose tolerance, withdrawal symptoms, relapse patterns, loss of control, and negative life consequences are just a few of the alarming psychological terms that may be just as relevant to the life of a couch potato as that of a narcotics abuser.
The idea that TV is addictive is, of course, nothing new. According to various surveys, about 10 percent of American adults, when asked to look hard at their lives, describe themselves as television junkies. The fascinating thing in the Scientific American article is the finding that television’s deleterious effects linger even when the set is cold and dark.
Heavy television users suffer a kind of mental hangover that persists long after they turn to some other activity. They sense that TV robs them of energy and the ability to concentrate. They hate the way television controls their lives, but “crash” when they stop watching. It sounds suspiciously like a drug delivered in an electronic package.
If all this is true, it follows that television and the academic life are mortal enemies. Reading is the lifeblood of learning, and it demands energy and concentration. If these have been sucked out of students (not to mention their professors) by excessive TV gazing, it may result in that curious feeling most of us know only too well, that glazed state of mind we experience when we have read everything and remember nothing. So do seekers after knowledge avoid television like the plague? No, it seems likely that we students (and, I dare say, professors) are not so different from our fellow citizens in the amount of time we spend sitting on couches or sprawled on the floor in front of the magic screen.
LSU students, if we are indeed up to the national norm in the area of television consumption, watch about three hours per day. By the time we entered LSU, we had given as much of our precious time to the TV set as we had spent in the classrooms of our elementary and secondary schools. If we keep it up, at that almost inconceivable point in the distant future when we turn 75, we will have spent nine years of our lives glued to the tube.
Will we have much to show for it? The hard truth is no, unless you view as positive the excess poundage brought about by lack of exercise. Perhaps by the time we’re 75, the government will have won the war on tobacco and other illicit drugs. The Surgeon General, for lack of anything better to do, will then advise us that television too is hazardous to our health.
But little warning stickers affixed to the bottom of the screen will have little effect. For our own good, they’ll have to send in the men in black to take our sets away.
I can almost hear the helicopters whirring and the thud of the storm troopers as they land on my lawn. But wait: you’ll get my remote control only after you pry away my cold and lifeless fingers. And that goes double if The Sopranos is still on.
Richard Buchholz