There are several points in Pete Hamill's essay Crack and the Box to argue with. His idea is that watching television is like heroine or other addictive drugs. He thinks we become passive and asocial because of it. Of course, television can be a problem for some people but for the majority, the time we spend watching television is just a chance to sit back, relax, and not think. After all, we've been busy all day. The whole argument that television is like an addictive drug is far fetched. .
In the Nielson survey of American viewers the average American family watched seven hours of television a day. This sounds shocking, until you realize that there are approximately 4.5 people per family. If you divide the seven hours of television viewing per person, then the hours a day watched per person comes out to roughly 1.55 hours. That's not so shocking, is it? Also, obviously technology has advanced in the past several hundred years. We have electric stoves and lights. We drive cars instead of horse carriages. These advancements give us a lot more time to relax. So comparing the amount of entertainment of today to that of the Elizabethans isn't very fair, or even to that of the pre-television generation. They didn't go to seven hours worth of movies because that many movies would be expensive. And who wants to sit in a theatre for seven hours? With television, we"re in the comforts of our own home.
Television does not "absorb it's viewers the way drugs absorb it's users." Most people I know can get up after a show is over and move on to something else. Drug addicts have to have a fix every few days or even hours. I don't know too many people who watch television every few hours. A lot of the people I know only watch it a few days a week.
Hamill uses a study of Michigan State University in the early eighties. In this study, a group of four and five-year-olds were asked if they would rather give up their father or watching television.
