Essay responding to "Television Addiction" by Marie Winn.

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Nikolay Gigov                                                         September 21st, 2003

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Essay responding to “Television Addiction” by Marie Winn

In her essay “Television Addiction”, Marie Winn considers television viewing as a serious addiction comparable to drugs and alcohol addictions. According to her, the television experience gets us into an enjoyable and inactive mental state so that we ignore the worries and the concerns of the real world. By giving various examples of how significantly the “small screen” may influence people’s lives, the author points out different negative effects of watching TV. For instance, she states that heavy viewers tend to ignore all other activities in order to spend countless hours in front the “tube”. Therefore, the lives of these people become as imbalanced and disordered as a drug addict’s. She claims that the watching habit destroys our sense of time and, as a result, seriously weakens our relationships with the others. I strongly disagree with Winn on this point because I consider television as a wonderful tool for improving our communication skills. Furthermore, nowadays, television is one of the largest sources of information.  

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First of all, television is one of the most important inventions of our time, which allows us to acquire a huge range of information. In her essay, Marie Winn declares that TV watching “is an unproductive experience” and “almost any other endeavor is more worthwhile by any human measure.” (15). How could she ignore the positive influence of television on our culture?  Television helps us become acquainted with the world around is. For instance, channels like CNN, BBC or CBC provide us the latest news or the weather forecast. Within seconds, we get informed of the most recent events around ...

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