Assignment 5: For the Love and Hate of Television (Tyler Gorman)

While I certainly think that there are a million more productive ways to spend time than watching TV, I do think it's an important form of entertainment. It's a form of storytelling that, as much as I hate to say it, may replace books at some point in the future simply because of its storytelling method: give the viewers a small but vital part of the story in a thirty- to sixty-minute-long increment once a week, and leave them at the end wanting to know what will happen next, leading them to tune in the next week for the next installation. It's essentially a comic book, except it takes away the difficulty (for some) of having to read the dialogue and presents it as an audible and watchable conversation, making it more popular for those who don't have the time or concentration to read a book, which would provide the same amount of material except with more visual and audio descriptors due to lack of actual images or sound, thus leading to the same story but told much more slowly. Don't get me wrong, a well-written book is far more valuable than a bad TV show; it just can't be denied that the ideologies behind television make it appeal far more to audiences in this day and age.