The Trouble With Television
It is difficult to escape the influence of television. If you fit the statistical averages, by the age of 20 you will have been exposed to at least 20,000 hours of television. You can add 10,000 hours for each decade you have lived after the age of 20. The only things Americans do more than watch television are work and sleep.
Calculate for a moment what could be done with even a part of those hours. Five thousand hours, I am told, are what a typical col¬lege undergraduate spends working on a bachelor's degree. In 10,000 hours you could have learned enough to become an astronomer or en¬gineer. You could have learned several languages fluently. If it ap¬pealed to you, you could be reading Homer in the original Greek or Dostoyevsky in Russian. If it didn't, you could have walked around the world and written a book about it.
The trouble with television is that it discourages concentration. Almost anything interesting and rewarding in life requires some constructive, consistently applied effort. The dullest, the least gifted of us can achieve things that seem miraculous to those who never con¬centrate on anything. But Television encourages us to apply no effort. It sells us instant gratification（满意）. It diverts us only to divert, to make the time pass without pain.
Television's variety becomes a narcotic（麻醉的）, nor a stimulus. Its serial, kaleidoscopic （万花筒般的）exposures force us to follow its lead. The viewer is on a perpetual guided tour: 30 minutes at the museum, 30 at the cathedral, 30 for a drink, then back on the bus to the next attraction—except on television., typically, the spans allotted arc on the order of minutes or seconds, and the chosen delights are more of¬ten car crashes and people killing one another. In short, a lot of television usurps（篡夺；侵占） one of the most precious of all human gifts, the ability to focus your attention yourself, rather than just passively surrender it.
Capturing your attention—and holding it—is the prime motive of most television programming and enhances its role as a profitable advertising vehicle. Programmers live in constant fear of losing anyone's attention—anyone's. The surest way to avoid doing so is to keep everything brief, not to strain the attention of anyone but instead to provide constant stimulation through variety, novelty, ac¬tion and movement. Quite simply, television operates on the appeal to the short attention span.
It is simply the easiest way out. But it has come to be regarded as a given, as inherent in the medium itself; as an imperative, as though General Sarnoff, or one of the other august pioneers of video, had bequeathed（遗留；传于） to us tablets of stone commanding that nothing in television shall ever require more than a few moments' Concentration.
In its place that is fine. Who can quarrel with a medium that so brilliantly packages escapist entertainment as a mass-marketing tool? But I see its values now pervading this nation and its life. It has be¬come fashionable to think that, like fast food, fast ideas are the way to get to a fast-moving, impatient public.
