What Technology Brings To Us

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What Technology Brings To Us

I have selected television as my technology subject because, on a global level, television has the greatest impact on the largest number of people of all the technologies available to us today. I have found that television has become widely distributed for many reasons, the most important being the fact that television sets have become more affordable over the years. There is also a desire by poor people in poor countries to have the same gadgets that are owned by the people in rich countries and only television can satisfy that need. Television can also be the means by which all levels of government can communicate with their populations.

Thanks to satellites, television signals can be received just about everywhere on the planet. In the Third World, a single television can bring people together in order to watch a program on the community-owned set. In less educated cultures, television must seem like magic and its magic can draw those people closer together for the common experience of seeing a TV program. However, that same technology in the hands of advantaged societies tends to drive people apart.

In America, you can often find a TV in every room (and sometimes in the bathroom), and various family members can spend hours and hours watching their own programming preferences on their own TV sets and not interacting with each other at all except during meals. Even the dinner hour cannot guarantee family communication. Too often, after-school activities such as sports and other outside interests draw people away from a shared meal. Those who eat alone often do so with a television for company, thereby replacing two-way conversations with the toxins of modern television programming. Television unifies the poor and separates the rich. It is both an anesthetic and a pacifier but it is never a reliable source for the truth.

Thanks to the wealth of this nation, American television has always had the resources needed to do very great things for the citizens of this country. It could bring profoundly important documentaries to the attention of those who are removed from those stories, it could teach children who have outgrown Sesame Street foreign languages and critical thinking skills plus it could easily spread the truth with each news broadcast. A higher level of entertainment could encourage more sophisticated tastes and cultural expectations. Instead, American television offers a disgusting collection of trash at all levels and that trash makes Americans a very proud but ignorant people.

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