"The Trouble with Television" Supporting Details

1) It is difficult to escape the influence of television. 2) If you fit the statistical averages, by the age of 20 you will have been exposed to at least 20,000 hours of television. 3) The only things Americans do more than watch television are work and sleep.

Which of these sentences could get added after sentence 2?

• You can add 10,000 hours for each decade you have lived after the age of 20.

• There is a crisis of illiteracy in this country.

• Personally, I have no opinion.

• It would be like watching television for the first time.

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1) Calculate for a moment what could be done with even a part of those hours. 2) Five thousand hours, I am told, are what a typical college undergraduate spends working on a bachelor’s degree. 3) In 10,000 hours, you could have learned enough to become an astronomer or engineer. 4) If it appealed to you, you could be reading Homer in the original Greek or Dostoevski in Russian. 5) If it didn’t, you could have walked around the world and written a book about it.

Which of these sentences could get added after sentence 3?

• Television’s variety becomes a narcotic, not a stimulus.

• It is simply the easiest way out.

• One study estimates that some 30 million adult Americans are “functionally illiterate” and cannot read or write well enough to answer a want ad or understand the instructions on a medicine bottle.

• You could have learned several languages fluently.

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1) The trouble with television is that it discourages concentration. 2) Almost anything interesting and rewarding in life requires some constructive, consistently applied effort. 3) The dullest, the least gifted of us can achieve things that seem miraculous to those who never concentrate on anything. 4) It diverts us only to divert, to make the time pass without pain.

Which of these sentences could get added after sentence 3?

• But television encourages us to apply no effort. It sells us instant gratification.

• Complexity must be avoided.

• In 10,000 hours, you could have learned enough to become an astronomer or engineer.

• If you fit the statistical averages, by the age of 20 you will have been exposed to at least 20,000 hours of television.

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1) Television’s variety becomes a narcotic, not a stimulus. 2) Its serial, kaleidoscopic exposures force us to follow its lead. 3) In short, television usurps ^tone of the most precious of all human gifts, the ability to focus your attention yourself, rather than just passively surrender it.

Which of these sentences could get added after sentence 2?

• The viewer is on a perpetual guided tour: thirty minutes at the museum, thirty at the cathedral, then back on the bus to the next attraction—except on television, typically, the spans allotted are on the order of minutes or seconds, and the chosen delights are more often car crashes and people killing one another.

• I think it tends to make things ultimately boring and dismissable.

• It sells neat resolutions to human problems that usually have no neat resolutions.

• One study estimates that some 30 million adult Americans are “functionally illiterate” and cannot read and write well enough to answer a want ad or understand the instructions on a medicine bottle.

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1) Capturing your attention—and holding it—is the prime motive of most television programming and enhances its role as a profitable advertising vehicle. 2) Programmers live in constant fear of losing anyone’s attention—anyone’s. 3) Quite simply, television operates on the appeal to the short attention span.

Which of these sentences could get added after sentence 2?

• Literacy may not be an inalienable human right, but it is one that the highly literate Founding Fathers might not have found unreasonable or even unattainable.

• The surest way to avoid doing so is to keep everything brief, not to strain the attention of anyone but instead to provide constant stimulation through variety, novelty, action and movement.

• The only things Americans do more than watch television are work and sleep.

• Calculate for a moment what could be done with even a part of those hours.

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1) It is simply the easiest way out. 2) But it has come to be regarded as a given, as inherent in the medium itself: as an imperative, as though General Sanoff, or one of the other august pioneers of video, had bequeathed to us tablets of stone commanding that nothing in television shall ever require more than a few moments’ concentration. 3) In its place that is fine. 4) But I see its values are now pervading this nation and its life. 5) It has become fashionable to think that, like fast food, fast ideas are the way to get to a fast-moving, impatient public.

Which of these sentences could get added after sentence 3?

• Everything about this nation—the structure of the society, its forms of family organization, its economy, its place in the world—has become more complex, not less.

• The only things Americans do more than watch television are work and sleep.

• Who can quarrel with a medium that so brilliantly packages escapist entertainment as a mass-marketing tool?

• It is simply the easiest way out.

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1) In the case of news, this practice, in my view, results in inefficient communication. 2) I question how much of televisions’ nightly news effort is really absorbable and understandable. 3) Much of it is what has been aptly described as “machine gunning with scraps.” 4) I think it tends to make things ultimately boring and dismissable (unless they are accompanied by horrifying pictures) because almost anything is boring and dismissible if you know almost nothing about it.

Which of these sentences could get added after sentence 3?

• If you fit the statistical averages, by the age of 20 you will have been exposed to at least 20,000 hours of television.

• I think its technique fights coherence.

• Personally, I have no opinion.

• It would be like inventing the television!

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1) I believe that TV’s appeal to the short attention span is not only inefficient communication but decivilizing as well. 2) It may be old-fashioned, but I was taught that thought is words, arranged in grammatically precise ways.

Which of these sentences could get added after sentence 1?

• Consider the casual assumptions television tends to cultivate: that complexity must be avoided, that visual stimulation is a substitute for thought, that verbal precision is an anachronism.

• Calculate for a moment what could be done with even a part of those hours.

• It would be like you having the attention span of a fly!

• Personally, I have no opinion.

1) There is a crisis of illiteracy in this country. 2) Literacy may not be an inalienable human right, but it is one that the highly literate Founding Fathers might not have found unreasonable or even unattainable. 3) We are not only not attaining it as a nation, statistically speaking, but we are falling further and further short of attaining it. 4) And, while I would not be so simplistic as to suggest that television is the cause, I believe that it contributes and is an influence.

Which of these sentences could get added after sentence 1?

• Television operates on the appeal to the short attention span.

• In the case of news, this practice results in inefficient communication.

• I believe that TV’s appeal to the short attention span in not only inefficient communication but decivilizing as well.

• One study estimates that some 30 million adult Americans are “functionally illiterate” and cannot read and write well enough to answer a want ad or understand the instructions on a medicine bottle.

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1) Everything about this nation—the structure of the society, its forms of family organization, its economy, place in the world—has become more complex, not less. 2) It is all symbolized in my mind by the hugely successful art form that television has made central to the culture: the thirty-second commercial: the tiny drama of the earnest housewife who finds happiness in choosing the right toothpaste.

Which of these sentences could get added after sentence 1?

• I hope you will join with me in doing so.

• I question how much of televisions’ nightly news effort is really absorbable and understandable.

• Yet its dominating communications instrument, its principal form of national linkage, is one that sells neat resolutions to human problems that have no neat resolutions.

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