Do you AGREE or disagree with the following statement? Television has destroyed communication among friends and family. Use specific reasons and examples to support your opinion.

TV has destroyed communication among friends and family, but perhaps more with the family. And it continues to do so.

These days, TV offers a panoply of programs, many inane, a few quite intelligent. Because watching TV is so much more convenient than conversing, people default to it. TV compounds the problem that family members aren’t getting enough time to really talk anymore. TV adds to electronic play stations, computers, home cable in keeping people focused outwards, through electronic channels, and not inwards to each other in intimate conversation
I imagine the art of conversation was much better developed in the past. I was told by my parents of times in their lives where they were expected to be home for dinner at a certain time. In the case of my mother, it had to be before the leaves of the acacia tree had folded, and I think that is at about 5 in the afternoon. My father tells me that in his case, it was when the bells of the Angelus struck at 6.

Some might swear that conversations among friends and family are actually stimulated by TV. I agree there’s conversation, but is it really the sort of communication that is therapeutic to the building of relationships? The way I see it, TV shifts the minds of people towards a form of Never-never Land, to borrow a term from Peter Pan, where people think that they really live. The here and the now are not actually real so only a minimum of attention and therefore conversation is accorded to it.

In the end, it might be said that there are a number of factors, not TV alone, that are eroding communication between friends and family. Yet, the contribution of TV to that erosion is quite significant.