Essay, Research Paper: Tv Addiction

Fourth Essay
“TV Addiction”
Quite a few people jokingly say that they have a friend or family
relative who is addicted to television. What they may not realize is it may in fact be true. In
Marie Winn’s essay “ TV Addiction “ , she first defines what she believes an addict to be,
then she compares an addict to someone who watches Television all day. Winn writes her
essay in a very simplistic manner, and focuses on the destructiveness of an addiction. Then
she compares it to the destructiveness of television.
First she discusses how the term addiction is commonly used out of
context. You will always hear people state that they’re addicted to Pepsi or mystery novels,
but are they really addicted? What these people actually mean to say is that they enjoy
reading mystery novels more than most other forms of passing time. The same is true for
Pepsi. They are not actually addicted to it, they just enjoy it more than most other
beverages. Marie Winn then poses a question.
Do you think television falls into the fake addiction category (the
addiction that is used out of context), or is it a real addiction? She does it in this way so
that when she states her argument you have already begun to think of an answer and
your mind is accepting or rejecting her statements. Since all of her statements support and
collaborate each other, it is very easy to be pulled into her train of thought.
Marie Winn then goes on to say that television addict, who know
they are addicts, tell themselves to do other things. They plan to do this or that, but instead
of doing something, they sit in front of the television. To these kind of people watching
television is an escape from reality. When you are watching a television show, you are not
worrying about the bills or the fact that you have to go shopping, you are only wondering if
the main character saves the girl and wins the day. The same is true for book readers. They
read to immerse themselves into another world and escape reality.
If one were to say television is an addiction you would not be wrong. If this is true
however, then anything can be considered addictive. Work, school, computers, books, models,
toy trains, baseball cards... are all things that can be considered addictive. For cases like these it
really should not be thought of as addictive. An adult human should show enough responsibility
to know what he/she likes and also to know when it is interfering with normal life. These people
should be made to understand that fiction is just that, fiction. It is not real and has no bearing on
real life.
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