Supporters of television argue that a positive aspect of television is that it’s entertaining. TV is entertaining and can keep young people safely at home. However staying in all the time encourages laziness. A large number of young people are obese; there are alarming statistics about lack of fitness among young people and the “Couch potato” syndrome. Young people are not only lazy in terms of fitness, television also affects the brain. Poor quality programmes encourage laziness in terms of brain activity because young people are like sponges soaking up whatever television throws at them, without actively using their brains. Few young people now enjoy reading books and valuable developmental skills, which have all been lost on TV generation. Television also prevents the development of social skills in young people.
Those in favour of television argue that a positive influence of TV is that it can broaden our perspective of the world. TV can broaden our perspective of the world and can help us appreciate and understand the difficulties faced by others. It broadens our perspective on race and religion because it makes us more tolerate of other people who are different from us. It also broadens our appreciation of the trials and tribulations of life like death, family conflict, relationships and teenage pregnancy. Television can make the audience empathise with the character who is paying the part. Despite these advantages popular programmes, like soap operas simplify and exaggerate real life, so that young people get a false impression of adult life. Many popular programmes also encourage intolerance and even violence and many people; particularly people of low intelligence find it difficult to distinguish fiction from reality. A lot of young people write letters to characters of shows especially soap opera characters. They either give abusive letters or sympathy letters, which is normally to do with what the characters does in the soap. This means young people actually believe what they are seeing on TV, like if there is a murder on the show then the character playing the murderer will be disliked and receive hate mail from youngsters particularly people of low intelligence.
Another positive influence TV has on young people is that advertising empowers young people. Advertising on television both informs and empowers the consumer but TV advertising is consumerism gone mad. The worst time for advertising is Christmas time because that is when all the toys for the children start coming out and the advertising goes mad. Often advertising is inappropriately targeted at young people, like alcoholic products! In addition TV advertising encourages consumers to buy beyond their means, which leads them into debt.
One positive influence television has on young people is that it makes the family get together and spend quality time. Television encourages quality time with the family but most families do not communicate while watching TV as they are too focused on what they are watching. Most family also eat their meals around the television set, so they are not really communicating properly. Too many children spend all their free time watching TV in their bedrooms, which leads to laziness, lack of communication, obesity and lack of brain activity. All of these lead to poorly developed, unsociable young people.
To conclude, overall it is clear that television has a negative influence on young people but young people clearly don’t understand what harm it’s doing to them and may not even care! Although there are some positive influences it is clearly shown that television is definitely a negative influence on young people. However I doubt whether this will ever stop young people watching TV!
