Idiot Box

I love watching TV programs! It’s my favorite hobby, my stress reliever after a long day at school. I love foreign shows-especially the ones aired at ETC and Star World. They are almost real and they depict true to life problems people specially the youth are experiencing nowadays. I like One Tree Hill, and I’m a sucker for The OC! I also watch investigative shows like CSI and Bones; and comedy ones like Scrubs and How I Met Your Mother. Fictional ones are also abound, like Smallville and The Ghost Whisperer. There’s so much more—talk shows, reality shows, news and current affairs, cartoons, movie channels. All of these genres give us audience a wider variety to choose from.

Television means “seeing at a distance.” You don’t have to be in direct contact with what you’re watching; hence, it is broadcasted. You could know things without having a teacher or being in school, and you can explain why something came to existence even if you haven’t seen that particular thing with your very eyes. This is how television works—it has gone further in affecting how we spend our hours and our money, how we relate to others, what we talk about and think about.

Here in the Philippines, television had come a long way. Before, foreign shows dominated the Filipinos’ TV sets; the earliest were even in black and white. The TV industry had its share of struggles before it flourished. Over the years, we came to develop a number of programs appealing to the Filipino audience—some of them were sitcoms and dance shows. Actors and actresses alike were noted for their superb performances in drama. Little by little, the Filipino audience believed in those programs and thus hastened the airing of foreign shows to give airtime to the rising local ones. This gave birth to new ideas for programs that will cater to the masses. Among these newly-introduced programs were gameshows and late-night variety/musical shows. Other types of programs filled the air, from Sunday morning church services to political interviews to sports like basketball and soccer. Moreover, competition between TV giants ABS-CBN 2 and GMA 7 sparked the audience’s interest to which channel to tune in and what programs to watch.

Today, we are bombarded with different programs having different themes, objective and market. Some are suited for elders, some are done for kids. Some are informative, others only pure entertainment. It’s like everything has its own place, its own audience. Some say it distorts our perceptions of reality and illusion, and that it erodes our regional distinction in speech and clothing. But everyone goes to television for all these and more, which is why television resonates so powerfully throughout the culture.

Sitting on the couch and watching TV programs for so long will reduce the time that we should be able to spend with our family members talking to them, but on the brighter side, television has its positive effects—like it aids in correct pronunciation especially foreign words, and the illiterates finding a new world opened to them—because television is cheap and readily available. It requires little energy, intelligence or education to enjoy it.

Maybe that was why it was called the idiot box—because it makes you passive to almost everything you see. Everytime you open it, that’s the time you are least productive and lazy. That’s why we should take control or our TVs—not the other way around. Let us all be responsible enough to know if we’re watching too much. Remember, too much of anything is bad. =)