Mckibben

Bill McKibben's claims about the negative effects of TV may have some truth in them but there are many instances where he "over-catastrophizes" the dangers of the media. He believes that, "TV, and the culture it anchors, masks and drowns out the subtle and vital information contact with the real world once provided." He speaks of being able to do things like gauge the wind or identify the weather just as farmers knew how to in the past, or spending years as an apprentice to learn the ways of a certain art. People are becoming more detached from the natural world and because of that missing out on vital knowledge that we need to survive. To me though, TV was a natural progression, an advance in technology, just as the light bulb or the radio. Its an efficient resource that can give us information on almost anything we want, and who is to say that that is a negative entity. I do though, agree with McKibben in many of his arguments about media shaping our perceptions. In this paper I will discuss his research in comparison to my personal experiences with television, and how his claims apply to my life being shaped by the media.

McKibben believes the rise in the amount of TV being watched by people is evidence of society phasing out the natural world and the knowledge that comes with it. He claims that we are moving from "the mountain and the field toward the television," and this will eventually cause the demise of the world as we know it through the oversimplification of learning things. He mentions that the problem is not the lack of information on TV, but the fact that television is a shortcut to knowledge. Knowledge that when actually learned and experienced like people used to, would take years to obtain. Just as the title states, McKibben believes that we're living in an age of "missing information." He doesn't necessarily hate TV, but he is very adamant on explaining the dangers that it is causing to society and people's perception of the world. I know that TV has definitely altered my perception of the world.

I watch a lot of TV everyday, I have watched a lot of TV everyday for a long time. "TV is cumulative, and over a lifetime ten minutes here and there of watching fishing or car racing or Divorce Court has added up to a lot of hours and has a certain effect on us all." In the excerpt, McKibben supports his claims by noting some statistics about Americans and their TV watching habits. I know that I am a statistic. I am one of those two thirds of Americans that gets most of their information about the world from television. I remember the day that TV literally sucked me in. When I was young I spent most of my time playing outside with the neighbors, the only TV I would watch was an hour block of Looney Tunes in the evening. One night my cousins were over and turned on Nickelodeon, which I didn't even know existed, and we watched it for hours. After that night I was addicted., glued, stuck to the screen. I ate up everything it put in front of me and always went back for seconds. I was introduced to a world of media that was new and fascinating to me.

Here is where I understand McKibben's views on television becoming a type of addiction that will impact and manipulate the way people live their lives. I know it changed the way I lived mine. There was more to TV than cartoons, there were real kids on the screen to influence me. I would watch the way they acted and looked, and absorb it like a dried out sponge. The commercials that aired on the channels I watched constructed all of my wants. McKibben questions what happens to the body and mind when subjected to these advertisements that make an impression over and over again, and what does this help produce. A commercial for a new toy would come on and I would obsess about it until I got it.

Looking back its pretty ridiculous, but all of the kids would do it. The advertisements essentially produced a part of the system that was completely controlled by children's wants. TV manipulated our minds then, and it has held a pretty strong grip on mine since that time. As I go through the different phases of my life many of the things I watch are representative of them. Cartoons when I was really young, "TGIF" shows all through my "tween" years, sitcoms and comedy shows all through high school, and now a mixture of all different shows including dramas, cooking and decorating shows, and news programs. All of these things had some reflection of what was going on in my life at the times I watched them. Perhaps this reflection was actually caused by what television was influencing me to do in the first place.

Today television has a huge influence on my generation. According to McKibben TV doesn't merely reflect society but it shapes it. We see music videos on MTV, the characters in shows like "The OC", and stars on the red carpet; this influences the way we dress, act, and maintain out bodies. TV generates new norms for society. I'm not particularly against the sex and violence shown on TV, but I do think that it influences what is acceptable today. This is where I'm half and half on McKibben's claims, and from an outside point of view it is where a fault occurs in my argument. I know that in this day and age he would probably be against what our society is being subjected to at the moment, but times have really changed over the past ten years. I've come to accept these new norms that television has helped influence. I know that when my parents were my age things were much more toned down. I don't even think twice when I see a girl in hot pants and a bra dancing around the screen, or people basically having sex in a scene of a show. It doesn't bother me because that's what I've been brought up by the media to accept. Television has been becoming racier and racier, which is ok with me, but as it pushes closer to the line of what is and isn't decent it changes the way people act. As