Television

Television is a device commonly found in most average households in today's world. Although it's been around long enough to be considered a recent invention, debates about whether or not it's harmful are still hot. Some people tend to focus only on the disadvantages of watching television and ignore all the positive points whenever the issue is brought up. They often talk about such problems as the bad effect of T.V on children, discouraging communication, and creating passivity. While T.V can be harmful in some respect, it can be quite useful in terms of educating people, bringing up critical individuals, and discouraging teenagers from going after undesirable things.

Television has been of great help in terms of educating large masses. Some people argue that television discourages people from reading books and even the methods of getting information via television are not as effective, but they fail to admit that television makes cheap and fast education available to masses. There are many channels that give people useful information about animal life, health issues, history, and anything that we can think of for free. For instance, the amount of information people can take in by watching The Discovery Channel for one hour is far more than what they can learn from reading a book for the same length of time. Television not only educates people, but also makes education fun by the accompanying sound and video. People tend to get tired by reading a few pages of a book and forget the material easily; however, being a multi-media device, television overcomes this problem by providing interesting video and sound input, which can also help the information stick in mind for a longer period of time using multi-sensory input. Television can also compensate for one of the major shortcomings of books, that is, the inability to engage the reader in the experiences presented in the book, by conveying feelings in a much more effective way. When people can actually see the facial expressions and hear the tone of voice of the speakers, they are more likely to be engaged in learning than when they are simply reading a passage. In short, television is a more effective tool for education than books for large masses of people.

Another way in which television can be considered to be helpful is bringing up critical individuals. While the argument that television can distort the reality and provide people with false information is a credible one, it is easy to take all the false information and turn it into something positive. Since there are many channels on television, each with its own agenda and its own way of interpreting events, people have the chance to hear the counter arguments and the opposing views as well. This gives people the choice to decide for themselves what is or is not true and helps them in their quest to become independent thinkers rather than mechanical organisms that agree with anything they hear. Different News channels interpret news in a way that suits their agenda, but if people are willing to hear opposing viewpoints and different interpretations, they can use this opportunity to enhance their critical thinking powers and to question things, without blindly falling for one particular way of seeing things. If anything, hearing different versions of the same story from various channels reminds people than there is always more to a story than meets the eye. This understanding