Sunday, March 30, 2008

Television, Friend or Foe?

Like other things that has two side of view and lots of people thought, so does television. Television gives good and bad side in the same time. It is important to underlined that the good and bad effect i'm writing about is not the television, but its programmes. If you turn on your television, i'm sure that you will find some ridiculous, nonsense television series, entertainment that show nudity, or news that reports violent. Instead of good side, those things can give bad effects to audience, especially children.

Series (we called it 'sinetron' in Indonesian) shows nothing but nonsense and ridiculous thing. It's like tell the story of bad person, who really really cruel in the series, who underestimate the good person, this person often told very very nice and his/her life is full of unfortunate events. The scene also put violent, such as slap, hitting, or pulling other's hair. Those scene can be adopted by children to their friend. Even about a year ago, there is a child who did a suicide because can't afford his school fee. How he know about suicide? I believe he didn't learn 'how to do suicide' in his school. Nudity also influences children's mind. They might be dress like their idol in television, while the idol wears tank top with hot pants, for example. Something romance, like hugging, kissing, which is should be only adults who watch, children now can watch. It may be kept in their mind that they should be like that too. As a result, lot of kids in elementary school have boy/girlfriend.
Beside, television makes children--and common people--not active, lazy, decrease their desire to read, and even decrease their imagination. According to an article in Courrier International newspaper 811 edition, too many spend time watching television can decrease child's natural abililty to imagine a picture. Here are the picture.

First image is drawn by a child with less than three hours watching television a day. While the second one drawn by a child who watch television more than three hours a day. Child number 1 can draw man and woman well, but child number 2 cannot draw the difference. He maybe can draw a human, but with no variation.


Television programmes not just give bad effects, yet we can still get knowledge and information from programme like news, leisure information, food recipes, talkshow (Oprah or Kick Andy, for example), and science channel (National Geographic, Discovery Channel). But too much spend time in front of television is not a good thing to do. There are other activities that make us move, use our brain to think and solve, such as playing lego, read a novel, doing sport, playing bridge or arrange a puzzle. With the right portion of watching television--and right choice of its programmes-- we can make television in our home as a friend.



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