COLUMN: Don’t hate: Just vegetate
It’s not easy telling people I write about TV to make money. Most people give me a blank stare and a whispered “huh,” obviously thinking such a job doesn’t possibly exist.
But, then there are those other people, the people who smugly say, “I don’t watch TV.”
Being an English major, I meet a lot of wannabe intellectual types who figure they are “above” television because they read Wordsworth or Shakespeare.
It seems the simple mention of the word “television” conjures thoughts of laziness, ineptitude and sheer stupidity. Why?
Granted, quite a bit of television programming is mindless blabber. Reality shows and MTV should be permanently burned from our consciousness. But, there are shows out there that can cause a person to think and reevaluate their lives. Shows that can move, touch and inspire.
Movies, for example, when first introduced were considered a waste of time, an activity for the common folk. Now movies reach millions of people worldwide and are used much like novels, to tell fictionalized stories of people and societies.
Television is a part of our culture, our society, like it or not. It’s a part of culture that people will be reading about in future textbooks, much like what we do with Shakespeare now. In fact, I was reading through one of my textbooks for Rhetorical Theory the other day where “Seinfeld” was mentioned and analyzed.
I’ve even watched “The Simpsons” in a humanities class (gasp! I know).
The point I’m trying to get at is that to say you don’t watch TV is to deny the very culture you are living in right now. It’s fine and good to read books to learn and grow; I do it all the time. But, it doesn’t mean you’re better than someone because you choose to read Hemmingway and they choose to watch “The Sopranos.”
Aaron Peck is a sophomore in English. Snarky
comments about TV rotting
his brain can be sent
to aaronpeck@cc.usu.edu