Wednesday, November 28, 2012

Impact of TV



Somewhere I heard a story about the goodness and the hazards of fire. Fire that is created by striking a match or a flicking a lighter. The story goes that fire can produce heat to keep us warm and cook our food or the same fire can burn down a forest or a house.
As with many things in life there can be a good and beneficial use or a bad and detrimental use for the same thing. This thought applies also to things like nuclear power and to personal things like our attitudes, thoughts, actions, beliefs and our tongues.

I saw this story below in Time Magazine that talks about how beneficial television is becoming for educating and informing the world in areas that have not had access to this medium.

We in the western world can easily overlook the importance of something this simple because we have been exposed to TV since we were born. Rather than being amused by or critical of those who only now are getting access to TV or other inventions and services, we use daily, why don’t we make efforts to figure out ways to help people around the world who don’t have our advantages?
How about collecting old TV’s in the US and sending them and other used modern devices to the world. TV’s and computers can and will be used more and more to educate the world’s population.

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A thinker's guide to the most important trends of the new decade

TV Will Save the World
By Charles Kenny Thursday, Mar. 11, 2010

‘Television's most transformative impact will be on the lives of women. In India, researchers Robert Jensen and Emily Oster found that when cable TV reached villages, women were more likely to go to the market without their husbands' permission and less likely to want a boy rather than a girl. They were more likely to make decisions over child health care and less likely to think that men had the right to beat their wives. TV is also a powerful medium for adult education. In the Indian state of Gujarat, Chitrageet is a hugely popular show that plays Bollywood song and dance clips. The routines are subtitled in Gujarati. Within six months, viewers had made a small but significant improvement in their reading skills.
Too much TV has been associated with violence, obesity and social isolation. But TV is having a positive impact on the lives of billions worldwide, and as the spread of mobile TV, video cameras and YouTube democratize both access and content, it will become an even greater force for humbling tyrannical governments and tyrannical husbands alike.’

Kenny, a development economist, is the author of a forthcoming book on innovation, ideas and the global standard of living

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