Opiniões

Television today plays an important role in society

Television today plays an important role, some times too important, in the way people think the surrounding world. Television is the most vulgar of all medias, perhaps excluding the newspapers, and although I think television is “looked” with different attention, this means that almost everybody, of the so called “civilized world”, has one, or at least sees it more or less regularly. Every bar, every coffe shop has a TV on. Maybe because its easy to understand you don’t need to have an extense culture to be able to look at a TV an understanding what’s happening there, what’s going on, if you don’t know how to read, you can try looking at the pictures, and listening. Television communicates in three different ways, sound, writing and image, what makes it accessible to all kinds of people, having an tremendous importance in the way they see the world.

 The fact that almost everybody has, or sees TV, quite often makes it an important object in their lives, because its through it that most people get to know what’s happening outside their small particular worlds. Television in the one bringing us the news almost every day, I mean every moment of our day. Because to know what happened today you have to buy the newspaper tomorrow, if you’re looking at the TV set you can get to now the result of the football match right at the end, you can even see the football match without leaving your comfortable sofa, and the warm of your house. It is also our company in some “solo” moments you can see a movie, get in touch with what’s new in fashion, listening to music……This means that most of the perception that we, that belong to this TV culture, have of the outside is made by what we’ve seen on television, It’s television, the “television people” who decide what’s important for us to now, so they show it us. It, or they, decide who is important in our society, they decide who is the best singer, the most beautiful women, the personality who dresses the best, and this means fashion, in the way I see things it even has the power to decide who wins the elections, by showing more of a candidate than other, by “exposing” what they choose to expose, even by making them look pretty. The things we buy, most of our needs are, TV made, example, if you see on  a television advertisement new fantastic running shoes that, they say, make you run faster, you just have to buy them, your three month old shoes no longer do the job, and you need new ones, the ones you saw on TV. Most of the models of our society, the big idols of today, are also, TV made, so they are actors, singers, politics, sportsmen, business men, etc.., but with one thing in common they have big television exposure, I mean they show up a lot, even myths, like Elvis, Marilyn Monroe, James Dean, Frank Sinatra, Fidel Castro, Napoleon, Joan of’ Arc, and others, recent or old, are known by what television shows of them.

I don’t want you to think that I’m against television, I only said that it’s many times taken like only way to get to know and understand the things that surround us, maybe because it’s the easiest way, and people get often limited to it, what I think its negative. Television is an important media because it’s always on the subject, but it’s not the only way to know things, “sometimes even self-experience is better”. TV is important, but I think we must be able to live without it.

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