My boyfriend walks through the door at exactly 5:30 pm everyday. After giving me a quick kiss and hello, he takes off his boots and settles in on the couch for the rest of the night in front of the television. It is very hard to persuade him to do anything else. It?s as if the bright screen has some kind of hold on his mind.
In Marie Winn?s essay, ?Television: The Plug-In Drug,? she talks about what an enormous role the television has assumed in the American family. She writes, ?Culture generally has been transformed by television? (326). Isn?t this the truth!? Our lives literally revolve around the television! When we aren?t watching a television program, we?re discussing shows we?ve seen with someone else who also saw them. So not only has the television taken up a large part of our family time, but also time away from TV! Winn says, ?As families have come to spend more and more of their time together engaged in a single activity of television watching, those rituals and past times that once gave family life its special quality have become more and more uncommon? (329).
Family watching television, c. 1958
Intertitle from the ABC television program The Who...
English: American family watching TV (cropped)She points out here that the things that once made family life unique have been replaced by a machine. We have to consider that much of the time that instead of playing a game as a family, we?re watching TV. A lot of times, even when I persuade my boyfriend to play a game with me, he would like to watch television at the same time. Of course over the noise of the TV in the background there is really no room for discussion or conversation.
The same is true for my family when we go to visit. Much of the time, during dinner and after,