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If someone should define the twentieth century in one word he would call it the television era. Nowadays we are so used to television that we find difficult to think that it did not exist before, and that our ancestor did not even know what it was .
So we may happen to find ourselves asking: what did they do then? How did they pass their time? The matter is that we cannot think of our life without television if we think accurately of a sample of our day we find out that we watch television throughout the day .
Generally speaking one person watches television at least three times during the day. The first one is in the morning: as soon as he wakes up he switches television on to hear news and then of course during the meals which means at lunch time and dinner .
Seldom, as soon as he goes back home in the late afternoon, after a long working day, he switches television on maybe because he feels relaxed by watching at it, or maybe just because he is annoyed and he thinks that television could help him .
If we count the hours that we pass in front of television we notice that we spend at least the third part of our day watching it .
Now, the problem is not the fact that we watch at it. As a matter of fact, television is useful because we can recent news every hour and we can know what happens in the other hemisphere of the world in real time .
Further more, some programs are very interesting and useful. Let's think about health programs which teach us how to discover or to cure an important disease. Or let's just think of the didactic or somehow entertaining documentaries: those about history .
It is out of doubt that thanks to television we can learn new things and come in touch with different realities that otherwise we cannot know or which at least it would be very difficult for us to know .
The real problem is that several times, if not always, we cannot do with out television. May people cannot bear not even one day of their lives without watching at it. Sometimes they also give up to interesting situations like for instance going out with friends or have a chat with them, because they prefer to stay home watching at their favourite program. Moreover, if someone talks to them while they are immerged in a program they don't even answer back .
In a certain way for this kind of people, television becomes a sort of drug. Their relationship with television is of dependence and they become incapable of conducting their life detached from this domestic * tool *.
In this content I totally agree with the fact that if Marx was alive he would state that television is the opium of the masses. But of course, is not only in this sense that we must consider the phrase. For many reasons, television, with its programs distracts people's attention from real problems. Its forms of entertainment which in some way are rather foolish, banal and far from being cultural aim to detach people from reality. As a result people are led to ignore political and social problems .
Watching television is a passive action because you receive images, news and words but you do not really create anything. Sometimes it forbids you to think, especially to think in a critically way. In certain way television does not allow you to develop your personality or at least a personality which is a different from that of others .
It seems infact that one of the television goals is that of bringing people all to the same level especially the one of language. Even if we do not realise it, we tend to speak all in the same way using the same words which are those that we hear from television programs .
Marx would certainly transform his statement replacing religion with television: but what I think is that he should also invite people to make a good use of it, because if we understand the real value of it I am sure that people's life will certainly improve .
