‘Winston turned a switch and the voice sank somewhat, though the words were still distinguishable. The instrument could be dimmed, but there was no way of shutting it off completely… Winston kept his back turned to the telescreen”
From 1984 by George Orwell.
In 1948, George Orwell wrote a book called “Nineteen Eighty-Four” about a society in which it was a crime not to watch television. In that fictional book, television told the people what to think. It even acted as a portal for thought-police to spy on the citizenry. In a free society, nothing forces anyone to watch television. However nearly one in ten adults have five or more televisions in their home according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS), with nearly a quarter watching television between 2-3 hours per day. One in ten people view television for more than 7 hours per day. By the age of seventy-five, most people in the UK would have spent more than 12 years of twenty four hour days watching television. It has become the industrialised world main activity, taking up more of our time than any other single activity except work and sleep.
Throughout the radical measures put forward by the UK government to improve the health of the nation there is no mention of health issues linked with the role of watching television inclusive of restrictive brain development and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) in children, positive links with Alzheimer’s disease in the elderly and also being a major cause of depression and sleep disturbances. There’s a plethora of negative direct links physiologically and psychologically from watching television and whatever happens to us individually from actively doing this, twelve years is a considerable amount of our lives to be taken from us. Instead of these being days of our lives they have truly become daze of our lives.
