Television is a utopia. The captivating fiction found on TV satisfies viewer’s urges and desires that might never take place in their mundane “real lives.” With television, scarcity is answered by abundance on Gossip Girl with Manhattan’s Upper East Side elites, dreariness is answered by intensity on Homeland when CIA agents vehemently work to shut down terrorist Abu Nazir, and fragmentation is answered by togetherness on Battlestar Galactica as the tight-knit fleet lost in outer space fight off Cylons and face the impending end of humanity as one. The fictionalized worlds in these examples of binaries are meant to seem more desirable than everyday life (Douglas). People on the production side of TV do this intentionally; they give us a world more preferable than our own to escape to. The excitement, passion, energy, community, affluence, and other extremes on either side of the spectrum often portrayed on TV are meant to get us hooked on fiction. Some researchers allude to the idea of “television addiction” and suggest that is can be comparable to serious drug and alcohol addiction (Goleman, par. 1). There are definitely people who watch excessive amounts of TV but to label them as “addicts” is an unwarranted accusation.
TV screens are everywhere. They watch us in the classroom as we learn, they watch us as we sleep, and they loom over us as we pump our gas. Even when we drive through residential areas on a quiet night with only the company of a staticky radio, we can see the soft blue glow of the living room tube pouring out of the windows onto front lawns or peeking through the drawn curtains of strangers. Television viewing is apart of everyday life but, since the TV has been allowed to infiltrate our lives, does that make it a source of “addiction?” New York Times columnist Daniel Goleman writes, “the most intensive scientific studies of people’s viewing habits are finding that for the most frequent viewers, watching television has many of the marks of dependency like alcoholism or other addictions” (par. 1). It is very hard to believe that someone who sits down to watch or even marathon episodes of, for example, Dexter for hours on end is comparable to a junkie “shooting up” on heroin; however, fictional narratives a designed to keep us coming back for more like other addictive substances might. People on the production side of fictional TV are met with the goal of getting the audiences hooked on the plot and characters.
To get viewers caught up in the plot TV creators eliminate stopping points and leave the viewer unsatisfied after each episode. Basically every fictional episode of TV currently on make use of “to be continued…” endings. The viewer gets a “high” as they are watching the episode and then suddenly they crash as the credits play and the next show begins. No longer do we get neatly packaged Leave It to Beaver episodes where there’s a light conflict but in the end everyone’s smiling and has learned a lesson; with those types of shows there really is not a reason to tune in next week other than maybe to feel good. Now, the audience really gets hooked to TV via the cliffhanger: a great incentive to come back for more. With shows like Leave It to Beaver, The Brady Bunch, and I Love Lucy each episode ends in a tidy way that the viewer can wipe their hands clean of but, if you watch, for example, The Walking Dead after viewing an episode there is a intense wanting and needing to know what happens next. We live on edge in anxiety for a week until the next episode wondering who will be the next to get bitten, wondering if they can fend off the zombies, and wondering if they have enough supplies to last the year. This wondering and waiting is where “addiction” starts.
The production side of television and fictional media in general not only get us “addicted” to plot but they play on our desires for human connection, our empathy, and our quest for a better self to get us “addicted” to characters as well. Creators give television characters attributes that we wish we had. We enjoy these characters because we want to be them. Through fictional characters we can “act out” in ways that are not totally expectable because of the societal rules that are in place. So when we watch Dexter and see him ridding the world of serial killers one murder at a time (oh, the irony), although we hate to admit it, we kind of admire him since he is doing what he loves (even if it is through killing people) while some of us slave away at jobs that we hate. Writer and Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams acknowledges this same idea in his book The Dilbert Principle. He writes, “Every engineer dreams about saving the universe and having sex with aliens. This is much more glamorous than the real life of an engineer, which consists of hiding from the universe and having sex without the participation of other life forms;” furthermore, he adds, “consequently, ratings for ‘Star Trek’ will remain high as long as they stay away from any realism" (“Analysis: Escapism, sec. 4) This is where “addiction” collides with escapism.
Both plot and characters in fictional television are blank canvases that we can project our desires upon. So we watch more and more TV and like junkies “shoot ourselves up” with the characters and plot lines made available by the “plug-in drug” in order to live out fantasies and then the cycle of escapism and “addiction” begins. First, “people have needs and desires that can’t be fulfilled in real life,” then, “people use fantasies to fulfill these needs and desires and spend more time inside fantasies,” and finally, “while inside a fantasy needs aren’t fulfilled while new problems appear” (“Analysis: Escapism”, sec. 11) So, the engineer wants to have sex with aliens, he then turns to Star Trek to watch his fantasy play out, he realizes that he never will have sex with an alien (or even a human for that matter), and finally upon this realization he returns to watch more Star Trek to satisfy his needs. Wash, rinse, and repeat. Now, the engineer is “addicted” to watching aliens have sex but, is that really so terrible?
Fictional TV can really be compared to any conduit of fiction. Television, books, and audiobooks are not really that different. Where books and audiobooks lack visual support descriptive chunks of text make up for it to aid the imagination. Television is easier to access in the way that we can sit in front of it and let the story play out without much energy of our own except cognitive processing. Books require much more effort to absorb. Many of us can probably remember being told, “turn off the TV and go read a book or something,” but really what’s the difference? Both activities require sitting down and engaging in fiction. Who is to say one is better than the other? TV can be smart too. For example, the A Song of Ice and Fire series by George R.R. Martin is fantastically intricate and forces to reader to pay close attention but, that does not mean that the TV show on HBO, Game of Thrones, is any less intricate. In fact, since the show is so much faster paced than reading a book the viewer may have to pay much closer attention to dialogue, locations, and subplots. Viewing this active does not fit in with the stereotype of TV as mindless entertainment.
The harmful rather than beneficial effects of watching television are always the main focus of research and studies. The desire to watch TV is often viewed as mindless, unproductive, and ultimately self-harming. “Perhaps, the most ironic aspect of the struggle for survival is how easily organisms can be harmed by that which they desire. The trout is caught by the fisherman’s lure, the mouse by cheese,” write Kubey and Csikszentmihalyi in regards to television but, let us pause and look at this quote again (1). The authors are comparing humans who watch a lot of TV to a mouse who gets caught in a trap and a fish who is a victim of sport. Due to the desires of the trout and the mouse we have two dead animals: one grilled for someone’s dinner and the other gets the prize of dying next to its one and only love as a furry sack of hot guts, blood, and bone splinters. So what does the human who watches too much TV get? Certainly not immediate death as the authors are almost getting at.
Watching TV has always been demonized pushing its advantages out of view. Of course watching something like Animal Planet, The Discovery Channel, or The History Channel has obvious educational benefits but even viewing fictionalized television and dramas has value. Television brings diversity into the home and has the potential to build tolerance within its viewers on racial, gender, and sexuality fronts. From the first interracial kiss on TV between Uhura (Nichelle Nichols) and Captain Kirk (William Shatner) on Star Trek to a show like Modern Family that has won four Emmys (in a single night) featuring a gay couple, television has brought diversity into areas from isolated suburban living situations to inner cities. If people are getting “addicted” to shows like these… what is the big deal? So what if they are watching eye opening television that teaches tolerance and empathy even if they are spending 56 hours a week doing so.
The biggest issue people have with television “addiction” is not its effect on the quality of life but how time consuming it is. The average American spends around four hours per day watching TV while people who identify themselves as “heavy viewers” spend nearly double that time watching TV (Turck, par. 4). It is funny how everyone is so quick to compare TV “addicts” to people like junkies when the main effect of TV “addiction,” time consumption, does not even come close to paralleling the life altering effects of sex, drug, and gambling addictions. Joe O’Connell describes the stages leading up to the 56 hours per week addiction state in his article “Confessions of a tube junkie // Or, how addiction to television really set me free.” First, comes scheduling time for TV, then “excessive videotaping” (or in modern times catching up online or downloading), then “pretty soon you’ll make excuses to miss the big New Year’s Eve party, because it’s so much more real when Dick Clark rings in the new year on TV” (par. 13). Displaying antisocial behavior by missing events is not even comparable to being devoted or given-over to a serious vice.
This debate of whether or not TV is addictive comes down to word choice and how we define addiction. As you may have noticed I have been putting the word “addiction” and its variants in quotation marks when relating it to television. This is partly because it has not been proven that people are dependent on TV like a junkie is on heroin but mainly because I think addiction is too powerful of a word. OK, so when primetime rolls around you would rather be watching TV than spending time with your family, so what? Ignoring family time for TV, although not ideal, will never be equivalent to someone being so dependent on drugs that they would rather fuel their addiction than pay rent. “In the past decade, it's become common to casually and humorously describe a favorite activity in the parlance of chemical dependency;” therefore, drawing comparisons between drug, sex, alcohol and gambling addicts and television “addicts” is inappropriate and lessens the seriousness of dependency on the former vices. Experts define addiction as a disease that chemically changes the brain and over stimulates the pleasure system yielding feelings of pleasure and euphoria (Alexander and Schweighofer). The term “addiction” implies disease and to suggest that people who watch too much TV are diseased is malarkey. The TV “addict” may exist in a metaphorical sense but not in a serious way that requires treatment. “People may watch to kill time or for escapism, but I’ve never seen anything conclusive that shows television to be psychologically addictive… It’s a proposition with no support, except in some metaphorical sense, the same way you might be addicted to dessert,” says senior vice president of research and planning with the National Association of Broadcasters in Washington Richard Ducey (Goleman, par. 13). It make much more sense to compare a self proclaimed TV “addict” to maybe a chocoholic or someone with a severe sweet tooth who is a fan of getting “chocolate wasted.” When someone proclaims to be a “chocoholic” with a hankering for all things cocoa, no one would ever go as far to take this proclamation seriously and refer him or her to a specialist. That would be downright tomfoolery. TV “addiction” should be regarded in the same way.
Personally, yes, I love fictional TV. I think about it all of the time, I am stressed now as I think about the shows I have missed, and it is a source of the lion’s share of my anxiety. I even have to go as far as maintaining a running list of shows to keep track of everything I am currently watching and this may sound like denial, but I would never call myself an addict. I am going to reserve the word “addict” for people who absolutely cannot control their desires. So, a more appropriate term for someone who is hooked on television should have similar connotations of the term “chocoholic.” Let us call ourselves TV buffs.
Works Cited
Alexander, Bruce K., and Anton R. F. Schweighofer. "Defining 'Addiction.'." Canadian Psychology/Psychologie canadienne 29.2 (1988): 151-62. Print.
"Analysis: Escapism." RSS. TV Tropes, n.d. Web. 13 Apr. 2013. <http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Analysis/Escapism>.
Douglas, Susan. "Grammar of TV Production; Television and Utopia." Natural Science Building, Ann Arbor. 25 Sept. 2012. Lecture.
Goleman, Daniel. "How Viewers Grow Addicted to Television." New York Times (1923-Current file): C1. Oct 16, 1990 1990. Print.
Kubey, Robert, and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. "Television Addiction is no Mere Metaphor." Scientific American 286.2 (2002): 74. Print.
McCauley, Mary C. "Defining Addiction." The Baltimore Sun: C.1. Apr 14, 2011 2011. Print.
O'Connell, Joe. "Confessions of a Tube Junkie // Or, how Addiction to Television really Set Me Free." Austin American Statesman: 65. Sep 18, 1997 1997. Print.
Turck, James F. "The Television Addiction – Part 1." The Television Addiction – Part 1. The Real Truth Magazine, 10 May 2004. Web. 13 Apr. 2013. <http://realtruth.org/articles/233-tta.html>.
