TELEVISION IS DOING IRREPARABLE HARM

"Yes, but what did we use to do before there was television?" low often we hear statements like this! Television hasn't been with us all that long, but we are already beginning to forget what he world was like without it. Before we admitted the one-eyed monster into our homes, we never found it difficult to occupy our pare time. We used to enjoy civilized pleasures. For instance, we used to have hobbies, we used to entertain our friends and be entertained by them, we used to go outside for our amusements to theatres, cinemas, restaurants and sporting events. We even used о read books and listen to music and broadcast talks occasionally. All that belongs to the past. Now all our free time is regulated by the "goggle box". We rush home or gulp down our meals to be in time for this or that programme. We have even given up sitting at able and having a leisurely evening meal, exchanging the news of :he day. A sandwich and a glass of beer will do - anything providing t doesn't interfere with the programme. The monster demands and obtains absolute silence and attention. If any member of the family dares to open his mouth during a programme, he is quickly silenced.

Whole generations are growing up addicted to the telly. Food is left uneaten, homework undone and sleep is lost. The telly is a universal pacifier. It is now standard practice for mother to keep the children quiet by putting them in the living-room and turning on the set. It doesn't matter that the children will watch rubbishy commercials or spectacles of sadism and violence - so long as they are quiet.

There is a limit to the amount of creative talent available in the world. Every day, television consumes vast quantities of creative work. That is why most of the programmes are so bad: it is impossible to keep pace with the demand and maintain high standards as well.

When millions watch the same programmes, the whole world becomes a village, and society is reduced to the conditions which Obtain in pre-literate communities. We become utterly dependent on the two most primitive media of communication: pictures and the spoken word.

Television encourages passive enjoyment. We become content with second-hand experiences. It is so easy to sit in our armchairs watching others working. Little by little, television cuts us off from the real world. We get so lazy, we choose to spend a fine day in semi-darkness, glued to our sets, rather than go out into the world itself. Television may be a splendid medium of communication, but it prevents us from communicating with each other. We only become aware how totally irrelevant television is to real living when we spend a holiday by the sea or in the mountains, far away from civilization. In quiet, natural surroundings, we quickly discover how little we miss the hypnotic tyranny of King Telly.

 

Текст 8

TELEVISION IN MODERN LIFE

How do people usually answer to questions like "What are you going to do tonight?" or "What are you doing at the weekend?" In other words, how do people spend their free time? Some twenty or thirty years ago the usual answers used to be:

"We're going to the theatre (or to the cinema)" or "We're going to a party" or "We're having some friends round". Now you very often hear "We're going to stay at home and watch the telly!" A first-rate colour TV set has become an ordinary thing in the household today, and a DVD player is quickly becoming one.

Modern television offers the viewers several programmes on different channels. In addition to regular newscasts you can see plays and films, operas and ballets, and watch all kinds of contests, quizzes, and sporting events. You can also get a lot of useful information on the educational channel. A good serial (perhaps, a detective story or a screen version of a classical novel) can keep the whole family in front of the telly for days, and don't we spend hours and hours watching our favourite football or hockey team in an important international event?

Television most definitely plays a very important part in people's lives. But is this a good thing or a bad one? Haven't we become lazier because of television? Don't we go out less often than we used to? Don't we read less?

 

Текст 9

TV…could you be without it?

Ninety-eight per cent of us in Britain have a TV set in our homes and, according to the experts, we rarely turn it off. In fact, the average viewer watches as much 5 as 25/4 hours a week. Yet television still provokes controversy.TV does undoubtedly have its bad side. Whilst any links between on and off screen violence have yet to be proved, few could deny that seeing too much fictional brutality can desensitise us to real-life horrors.

Furthermore, even when programmes contain neither sex nor violence, it's not really a good thing for so many families to spend whole evenings glued to the box. Some primary school teachers are complaining of youngsters' inability to concentrate and their need to be constantly entertained. It would seem that too much TV is to blame.

Of course, it's not only children whose happiness can be affected by television, It can lead to the 'lodger' syndrome, where some husbands come home, flop down in front of the TV and simply don't communicate with their families at all. In some homes, soap operas have become a substitute for real life.

Yet there is another side to the picture. For the lonely, elderly or housebound, television can be a blessing, being a cheap and convenient form of entertainment and a 'friendly face1 in the house. It can be an ideal way to relax, without necessarily turning you into a square-eyed addict.

Television doesn't just entertain, of course. There are times when it can be informative and can provide a source of good family conversation. There is no evidence that other hobbies and interests have lost out, either. In fact, it seems that television has helped to popularise some games, like snooker and darts. And a final point. Over the past few years, television has played a crucial role in disaster relief. During the Ethiopian famine in 1984, the huge fund-raising so efforts of Band Aid might have had little impact without the heart-rending pictures we saw on our screens, or the world-wide link up of millions of viewers who donated money to the cause. Informative, useful, entertaining and relaxing - and yes, banal and boring - television is all of these. But if we're not selective, surely we have only ourselves to blame. TV can be part of family life, but when it becomes all of it, maybe that's the time to reach for the 'off” switch.

 

Текст 10

A medium of no importance

Grown-ups, as any child will tell you, are monstrous hypocrites, especially when it comes to television. It is to take their minds off their own telly addiction that adults are so keen to hear and talk about the latest report on the effects of programmes on children. Surely all that nonsense they watch must be desensitising them, making them vicious, shallow, acquisitive, less responsible and generally sloppy about life and death? But no, not a scrap of convincing evidence from the sociol­ogists and experts in the psyches of children.

The nation has lived with the box for more than 30 years now and has passed from total infatuation - revived temporarily by the advent of colour - to the present casual obsession which is not unlike that of the well-adjusted alcoholic. And now the important and pleasant truth is breaking, to the horror of programme makers and their detractors alike, that television really does not affect much at all. This is tough on those diligent professionals who produce excellent work; but since - as everyone agrees - awful programmes far outnumber the good, it is a relief to know the former cannot do much harm. Television cannot even make impressionable children less pleasant.

Television turns out to be no great transformer of minds or society. We are not, en masse, as it was once predicted we would be, fantastically well-informed about other cultures or about the origins of life on earth. People do not remember much from television documentary beyond how good it was. Only those who knew something about the subject in the first place retain the information.

Documentaries are not what most people want to watch anyway. Televi­sion is at its most popular when it celebrates its own present. Its ideal subjects are those that need not be remembered and can be instantly re­placed, where what matters most is what is happening now and what is going to happen next. Sport, news, panel games, cop shows, long-running soap operas, situation comedies - these occupy us only for as long as they are on. However good or bad it is, a night’s viewing is wonderfully forgettable. It's a little sleep, it's En­tertainment; our morals, and for that matter, our brutality, remain intact.

The box is further neutralised by the sheer quantity people watch. The more of it you see, the less any single bit of it matters. Of course, some programmes are infinitely better than others. There are gifted people work­ing in television. But seen from a remoter perspective - say, four hours a night viewing for three months - the quality of individual programmes means as much as the quality of each car in the rush-hour traffic.

For the heavy viewer, TV has only two meaningful states - on and off. What are the kids doing? Watching TV. No need to ask what, the answer is sufficient. Soon, I'll go up there and turn it off. Like a lightbulb it will go out and the children will do something else.

It appears the nation's children spend more time in front of their TVs than in the classroom. Their heads are full of TV - but that's all, just TV. The violence they witness is TV violence, sufficient to itself. It does not brutalise them to the point where they cannot grieve the loss of a pet, or be shocked at some minor playground

 

Answer the following questions:

1. Does the writer think television is harmful to children? Why/Why not?

2. Has the nation become more or less keen on television since it was first introduced? What development had an effect on the popularity of television?

3. How successful is television as an educator, according to the writer?

4. Why do most people watch television, according to the writer?

5. What effect does quantity of viewing have on people?

6. Why are children not affected by television violence, according to the writer?

7. In one word, what is the advantage of the book over television?

 

Прочитав Тексты 9 и 10, ответьте на вопросы:

1. Does television affect the British population according to the texts? Is it a transformer of minds?

2. Is it true that today awful programmes far outnumber the good ones?

3. The first article rejects the educational role of television and documentary in particular. What is your personal opinion of the BBC films?

4. Are you fond of night's viewing? Is it still popular with the British?

5. Who do you consider gifted people working in Russian television?

6. Does the quantity of programmes the British see matter much?

7. What are two meaningful states of TV for the heavy viewer/ children?

8. Do children understand the difference between TV and life?

9. Why did the written word have such an impact on civilization?

10. What ideas coincide in both texts?

11. Why can't youngsters concentrate at school?

12. What is the "lodger" syndrome?

13. What is an advantage of TV for the elderly?

14. In what way does the text "TV" stress the educational role of television?

15. Set the examples of a crucial role of TV for disaster relief, for example, people, famine, earthquakes, floods and so on.

 

Текст 11

Radio and Television

In 1936 the government established the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) to provide a public service in radio. Since then the BBC has been most affected by the invention of television, which changed the entertainment habits of the nation, and the establishment of independent and commercial radio and television, which removed the BBC's broadcasting monopoly. In spite of its much reduced evening, audience, BBC radio still provides an im­portant service. Its five radio stations pro­vide (1) non-stop pop music; (2) light en­tertainment; (3) minority interests, e. g. classical music, arts programmes and aca­demic material (some for Open University courses), cricket commentating in the summer months; (4) news and comment and discussion programmes; (5) sport and edu­cation. The BBC additionally runs thirty-seven local radio stations, providing mate­rial of local interest. There are also seventy: independent local radio stations which pro-; vide news, information, music and other entertainment, coverage of local events, sports commentary, chat shows and 'phone-in' programmes. The latter provide an im­portant counselling service to isolated, ag­grieved or perplexed people.

An important but separate part of the BBC's work is its external services, essen­tially the BBC World Service and its broadcasts in thirty-five vernacular languages.

These are funded separately from the rest of the BBC, by money from the Foreign Office. In other words, although the BBC has freedom in the content of what it broadcasts, the government decides in which foreign languages it should broadcast, and the amount of funding it should receive. In this way the service is a promotional part of British foreign policy. In 1990 research showed that the BBC World Service en­joyed an audience of approximately 120 million listeners, who were predominantly young (aged between 25 and 35) and male. The strength of the BBC's external services has been the provision of relatively objec­tive and impartial news and comment to listeners in countries where local censor­ship exists.

Television is the single most popular form of entertainment in Britain. In the late 1980s the average adult spent twenty-five hours, and children eighteen hours, in front of the television set each week. They had four channels to choose from: BBC1 and BBC2, ITV (Independent Television) and Channel Four. Channel Four, which was established in 1982, specialises in minority interest programmes, but has proved highly successful. BBC television derives its in­come from the annual license fee for television, while ITV and Channel Four are financed solely through advertising. Coro­nation Street, ITV's most watched show, attracts advertising worth ten times the cost of making the programme.

The strength of British television lies in its high quality. "Go anywhere in the world," one leading political journalist has written, "and British television is an object of envy and admiration... The reason lies in the quality of its innovation and its willingness to experiment. For example, British television enthusiastically took the Muppet Show, when its creator, Jim Henson, had been rejected by the American networks. In the fields of TV documentary comedy and satire, or drama, British tele­vision is a world leader.

 

Текст 12

Advertising

Advertising is the businessman's tool for convincing the public to buy products. In the beginning, it was a basic and crude tool. Craftsmen relied on word of mouth, crying out to passersby to extol the virtues of their wares. As time passed advertising became more refined and sophisticated Newspapers, magazines, radio, and television introduced a vast audi­ence to the many new products developed through exploration and technology.

Advertising probably began when civilization evolved from agricultural com­munities and people began producing goods to offer one another. In ancient times, spoken publicity was a recognized Institution as a means of bartering for goods. Public criers pro­claimed information of articles for sale along with news of current events. Greek criers were often accompanied by both vocal and instrumental music. Egyptian criers drifted through the streets of Alexandria announcing the arrival of ships and the nature of their cargo.

Crying to the public was a haphazard way of reaching people. Recorded adver­tisements were soon recognized to be more reliable. The ancient Romans devised two methods of recording ads: 1) they smoothed and whitened areas on a wall where advertisements could be written or carved. These announcements were called "albums" and were later used by Roman artisans to advertise the tools of their trade. 2) They used stone or terra cotta tablets with lettering and illustration in relief that was done by sculptors. Plaques like these were set into the walls of houses or suspended by brackets above a door. They announced gladiatorial contests, athletic exhibitions, rooms for rent, lost-and-found articles, and the merits of candidates running for public office.

By the Middle Ages, symbolic advertising was developed. A symbol represented certain goods or services. Shops displayed a special object to indicate what goods or services could be found inside. The striped barber's pole, for example, advertised that the man in the shop would shave your beard, cut your hair, pull your teeth, and perform minor surgery. Three gold balls indicated a pawnshop, where you could trade your goods as a guarantee for bor­rowed money.

In the Middle Ages, verbal announcements, written messages, and symbolic figures ail performed the basic function of giving information about goods and wares. Then two historical changes — the Age of Exploration and the Industrial Revolution — caused an explosion in the advertising field. As new inventions made it possible to duplicate advertisements in bulk quantities, virtually endless amounts of advertising were foisted on an unlimited consumer audience. The abundance of new luxury goods, which came from both discovery and inven­tion, meant that consumers had to be told more about the product than before. The public had to be persuaded and convinced that it needed all these new products and that the product was better than its many competitors. These new dimensions made advertising an extremely pow­erful field.

Advertising became a professional business of creating new markets, new products, and new needs. The advertising men became specialists, pooling their efforts to organize them­selves as an advertising agency. The jobs of the agency included representing a number of media (newspapers, magazines, etc.) in the sale of space to advertisers, writing copy, selection of the proper medium, and analysis of market.

Advertising followed the wave of scientific development of the 1920s. Advertisers abandoned their blind faith that products would sell and backed their ventures with scientific methods instead. Agencies set up their own market and consumer research departments. Special firms did research for advertisers and the media. They systematically investigated all the factors involved in selling: the product, the character and mood of the prospective buyers, the buyers' geographical location and purchasing power, etc. Along with attracting a new buying public, advertising also attracted criticism. Advertising developed two particular techniques which are still used today: exaggerat­ing the virtues of many products and 2) creating a need in the minds of the consumers where a need does not actually exist.

The advertisers' extravagant claims created an uncomfortable feeling that nothing was quite as good as the ad described it to be. Despite this criticism, advertising continues to capture the fancy of the consumer, who continues to buy. Motivational research is probably the key reason. It seeks to discover why people buy the things they do. Researchers observed that in a buying situation, people often act emotionally and impulsively — reacting subconsciously to images and designs on the product package. The average woman, for example, is willing to pay up to $2 or more for a facial cream but not more than 50 cents for a bar of soap. According to the motivational research, her subconscious is responsible for directing her actions. She buys under the illusion that the facial cream will make her beautiful while the soap will only make her clean Modern advertisers realize that their task is to find images which appeal emotionally to a segment of consumers. The possible combinations of images and their corresponding buying segments are infinite.

Advertising has come a long way since the stone carvings in ancient Rome. The basic point remains the same – to sell a product. But now advertising appeals to as big audience as possible, making the public buy a vast array of luxury items. Persuasion is the tool of the trade and the key to success.

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