Kill Your TV to Develop Critical Thinking Skills

ByShaun Snapp

Executive Summary

  • Education Oriented?
  • PBS as One Solution
  • Alternatives to TV
  • Robotic America
  • How TV Can Be Removed

Education Oriented?

Americans can be difficult to believe. If asked, most will tell you that they value education. However, on the other hand, the average American watches 47 hours of television per week. TV is of course controlled by monied interests that have an incentive to infantilize you and to control the dialog in a way that benefits them. The entertainment shows cater to the more base desires, and the news programs habitually put out false information. Fox News is the grand champion of propaganda.

PBS on as One Solution

Even the news shows on PBS are not much better. They bring out many people with a vested interest or those that already work for concentrated power to provide an analysis within a very narrow framework. Pretty soon, you begin accepting the assumptions. The controlled nature of the people interviewed is never discussed. This is due to pressure from Republicans to offer “balanced” coverage. This is why PBS has documentaries about Milton Friedman, why Nail Ferguson has been showcased on the station.

Alternatives to TV

I have adopted a strategy of watching documentaries (and some comedies and dramas) on Netflix, and buying shows like PBS Frontline and other documentaries through iTunes. This allows me to have a library of educational material that I can watch at will. Every time I do watch television; I am shocked by its output. Garbage is a good descriptor, and because of its high pay, people are proud to work in television.

Robotic America

Television has made most Americans extremely boring to talk to and as a nation, people that simply repeat statements and beliefs that were observed on television. I meet people on airplanes and dates, and almost always come away with the impression that Americans have extremely low knowledge levels. Our history knowledge is bad, geography is bad, knowledge of the basic sciences is awful. And no one cares, because people evaluate each other based on their appearance and their status accessories, and knowledge is far less valued than status. If knowledge can be leveraged into social status, into high income, then it means something. But knowledge for its own sake? Hardly. As the saying goes “If you are so smart, why aren’t you rich.” That statement encapsulates the feeling that knowledge must be able to bring income to have value.

How TV Can Be Removed

However, television is unnecessary. I live without one, and I often have televisions removed from my hotel rooms. My computer has become my entertainment/education media system. Although with Fox and CNN and any other channel now available on YouTube, the line is of course now blurring. However, as described in a recent article by The Economist, TV is as popular as it ever was, even with the growth of many different forms of media.

References

This I thought was an interesting quote from an Amazon.com review on a book also on the topic of what television does to us.

Postman’s thesis in this brief but articulate book consists of two tenets: (1) The form of communication, to some extent, determines (or is biased toward certain types of) content; (2) Television, as our modern-day uber-form of communication, has biases which are destructive toward the rational mind. TV teaches us to expect life to be entertaining, rather than interesting; it teaches us to expect 8-minute durations of anything and everything (anything else is beyond our attention span); it teach us to be suspicious of argument and discussion, and instead to accept facts at face value.Furthermore – and, by far, the most important discovery Postman makes in this book – TV teaches us to live a decontextualized life. Just as a TV program has nothing to do with anything before or after it, nor the commericals inside it, we learn to view life as a series of unconnected, random events which are entertaining at best, and bear no significance toward any larger picture. – https://www.amazon.com/gp/pdp/profile/A2A4V9ESS5I782/r