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Part Ⅱ Reading Comprehension (Skimming and Scanning) (15 minutes)
Television: The Cyclops That Eats Books
What is destroying America today is not the liberal breed of politicians, or the International Monetary Fund bankers, misguided educational elite, or the World Council of Churches. These are largely symptoms of a greater disorder. But if there is any single institution to blame, it is television.
Television, in fact, has greater power over the lives of most Americans than any educational system or government or church. Children particularly are easily influenced. They are fascinated, hypnotized(著迷的) and tranquilized by TV. It is often the center of their world. Even when the set is turned off, they continue to tell stories about what they've seen on it. No wonder, then, that when they grow up they are not prepared for the frontline of life; they simply have no mental defenses to confront the reality of the world.
The Truth About TV
One of the most disturbing truths about TV is that it eats books. Once out of school, nearly 60% of all adult Americans have never read a single book, and most of the rest read only one book a year. Alvin Kernan, author of The Death of Literature, says that reading books "is ceasing to be the primary way of knowing something in our society." He also points out that bachelor's degrees in English literature have declined by 33% in the last twenty years. American libraries, he adds, are in crisis, with few patrons to support them.
Thousands of teachers at the elementary, secondary and college levels can testify that their students' writing exhibits a tendency towards superficiality(膚淺) that wasn't seen, say, ten or fifteen years ago. It shows up not only in the students' lack of analytical skills but in their poor command of grammar and rhetoric. The mechanics of the English language have been tortured to pieces by TV. Visual, moving images can't be held in the net of careful language. They want to break out. They really have nothing to do with language. So language, grammar and rhetoric have become fractured.
Recent surveys by dozens of organizations also suggest that up to 40% of the American public is functionally illiterate. The problem isn't just in our schools or in the way reading is taught. TV teaches people not to rean. It makes them incapable of engaging in an art that is now perceived as strenuous(費力的) and active.
Passive as it la, television has invaded our culture so completely that you see its effects in every quarter, even in the literary world. It shows up m supermarket paperbacks, from Stephen King to pulp .fiction (低俗小說). These are really forms of verbal TV-literature that is so superficial that those who read it can revel, in the same sensations they experience when they are watching TV.
Even more importantly, the growing influence of television-has changed people's habits and values and affected their assumptions about the world. The sort of reflective, critical and value- laden thinking encouraged by cooks has been rendered out of date.
The Cyclops
In this context, we would do well to recall the Cyclops(獨眼巨人)--the race of one-eyed giants in Greek myth. The following is Hamilton's description of the encounter between the adventurer Odysseus and Polyphemus, a Cyclops.
As Odysseus was on his way home, he and his crew found Polyphemus' cave. They stayed in it as a shelter and waited for the owner to come back. At last he came, hideous and huge, tall as a great mountain crag. Driving his flock before him he entered and closed the eave's mouth with a ponderous slab of stone. Then looking around he caught sight of the strangers. He roared out and stretched out his mighty arms and in each great hand seized one of the men and dashed his brains out on the ground. Slowly he feasted off them to the last shred, and then, satisfied, stretched himself out across the cavern and slept. He was safe from attack. None but he could roll back the huge stone before the door, and if the horrified men had been able to summon courage and strength enough to kill him they would have been imprisoned there forever.
What I find particularly appropriate about this myth as it applies today is that first, the Cyclops imprisons these men in darkness, and that, second, he beats their brains out before he devours them. It doesn't take much imagination to apply this to the effects of TV on us and our children.
TV's Effect on Learning
Quite literally, TV affects the way people think. In Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television (1378), Jerry Mander quotes from the Emery Report that when we watch television "our usual processes of thinking and discernment (識別能力) are semi-functional at best." The study also argues that while television appears to have the potential to provide useful information to viewers, the technology of television and the inherent nature of the viewing experience actually inhibit learning as we usually think of it.
When we watch TV we think we are looking at a picture, or an image of something, but what we are actually seeing is thousands of dots of light blinking on and off in a strobe(屏閃)effect that is calculated to happen rapidly enough to keep us from recognizing the phenomenon. More than a decade ago, Mander and others pointed to instances of "TV epilepsy(癲癇癥)," in which those watching this strobe effect overextended their capacities, and the New England Journal of Medicine recently honored this affliction with a medical classification: video game epilepsy.
Shadows on the Screen
Television also teaches that people aren't quite real; they are images or little beings who move in a medium no thicker than a sliver of glass. Unfortunately, the tendency is to start thinking of them in the way children think when they see too many cartoons, that people are merely objects that can be destroyed. Or that can fall over a cliff and be smashed to pieces and pick themselves up again. This violence of cartoons has no basis in reality. Actual people aren't images but substantial, physical, corporeal beings with souls. And, of course, the violence on television leads to violence.
TV：Eating Out Our Substance
TV eats books. It eats academic skills. It eats positive character traits. It even eats family relationships. How many families do you know that spend the dinner hour in front of the TV, seldom communicating with one another? How many have a television on while they have breakfast or prepare for work or school?
And what about school? I've heard college professors say of their students, "Well, you have to entertain them." One I know recommends using TV and film clips instead of lecturing, "throwing in a commercial every ten minutes or so to keep them awake." A teacher should teach. But TV eats the principles of people who are supposed to be responsible, transforming them into passive servants of the Cyclops.
TV eats our substance. What we see, hear, touch, smell, feel and understand about the world has been processed for us. TV teaches that all life-styles and all values are equal, and that there is no clearly defined right and wrong.
Muggeridge concluded: "There is a danger in translating life into an image, and that is what television is doing. In doing it, It is falsifying(竄改)life. Far from the camera's being an accurate recorder of what is going on, it is the exact opposite. It cannot convey reality, nor does it even want to."
