Watching TV is Like Watching Children’s Picture Books
by Sabrina Dawkins
TV dumbs you down because it’s like looking at a children’s picture book, gazing at the glossy pages with bright colors. It’s like watching cartoons for the rest of your life, looking at moving pictures instead of words. You become mentally stunted. Even worse, you jump around, skip to the middle of the book because of course a 30-minute show or even a two-hour movie cannot contain all of the information needed about a given topic. So it’s akin to picking up a glossy picture book, looking at a few pages, then skipping to other parts of the book, and then opening up another picture book and looking at random pages as you go on to watch another 30-minute show. You can’t develop a complete body of knowledge that way, and your intelligence is determined by how smart the creators of the shows you consume want you to be.
The internet dumbs people down as well when they use it as if it were a television. They Google quick answers to questions instead of reading books about topics they’re interested in, and they watch short entertaining video clips more often than they read entire e-books online.
Imagine walking into a convenience store, sitting down, and watching the television. What you consume from the convenience store will likely be junk food, like the poison your TV feeds your brain and soul. It seems like the easier, more convenient way to get information: watch a movie about people instead of reading books about them. But as you sit or lay there watching TV, an invisible entity methodically shoots you once in the leg, making you handicapped for the rest of your life. But it will be subtle because everyone around you, all TV-watchers, will be equally stunted. They will be able to chat with you about the same limited topics discussed on the nightly news because you both watch the same kind of shows brought to you by the same few networks.
Mental work is not easy, and sometimes it can be unpleasant, but the alternative is a stunted brain that never really graduated from children’s picture books.