In her essay, "TV Addiction," Marie Winn intelligently states her point of view on what addiction means to her; clearly describing what activities qualify as an addiction and how (and why) we find it so difficult to turn away. Winn organizes her essay in such a way that she begins broadly, focusing on the many things a person can become addicted to, and then, as the essay becomes more developed, averts all of her attention to the television set, a power source of pleasure that she believes to be a great supply of "unproductive experience[s]," and a drug, so to speak, that the human being cannot help but become seriously addicted to. .
Winn describes an addiction, in essence, as the "pursuit of pleasure, a search for a "high" that normal life does not supply. "To enforce her idea that television is truly a serious and destructive addiction, Winn points out other addictions, such as drugs and alcohol, and the qualifications that make them an addiction. The human beings inability to function properly and normally without the object of desire, or "addictive substance" is dismaying to her because the addiction of television, as the addiction of anything else can never be sated; the abuser will constantly want to indulge, delving deeper and deeper into a spiral of uncurbed craving, driven by an unusual intensity. This "unusual intensity" is described as the addicts inability to "not merely pursue a pleasurable experience and need to experience it in order to function normally", but to repeat it again and again." Winn states that an addiction consumes the life of the addict.
But it is common for us to become addicted to a substance and Winn realizes this early on, denoting that an addiction is not really up to the addict, that it envelopes our every thought, that we have some to believe that we would not be able to survive if we did not buckle down and give in to out wants. Whether it be cake to a fat kid or heroin to a drug user, the addict continually feeds his ˜obsession', because "under the spell of the addictive experience, his life is peculiarly distorted".
