Television and its influence
Television is probably one of the greatest inventions of mankind of all times. There's probably no such a person on Earth (except native tribes somewhere in Africa or Australia) that doesn't know what television is. Every family has at least one TV set and almost everybody watches it regularly. That's quite an achievement for an invention that first appeared less than one century ago. If in 70's or 80's a TV set was considered an expensive and luxurious thing to have, today it's something so everyday and usual that we don't even realize how deeply television has penetrated our lives. So what made it so popular and why television is such a controversial phenomenon today?
The matter is that it's not the invention itself that's important, but what it gives us. And it gives us information. And information is everything. Today we're living in an information-oriented society, so information is as important for us today as food or sleep. Having information today means being successful. And information is something that the television is designed for in the first place.
Today television (together with radio and newspapers) is one of the most widespread and most influential mass media in the world. It's a medium for information, education, political and cultural breeding of individuals. It's also widely used in scientific researches, like observation of objects from far distances, in technologies, industry, transport, building, agriculture, meteorology, space researches, military science etc.
The influence of television on human mentality is unquestionable today. Hundreds of scientific works have been written about psychological aspects of watching TV by various audiences from children to aged people and one thing has been established by all of them – television may affect people's minds in different ways depending on what kind of information is shown to them. That's why special government authorities have been created in many countries to prevent forbidden types of information to be shown to people, as well as for controlling forbidden techniques and tricks of presenting such information to them. Such techniques are especially dangerous for children and young people as their psychological state is experiencing the stage of transformation, when their attitudes to themselves, their social surroundings, people around them are changing.