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Issue 38

"In the age of television, reading books is not as important as it once was. People can learn as much by watching television as they can by reading books."


I agree with the speaker’s assertion insofar as in the age of television, people can learn from television as much as they can through books. However, Even I concede that with the rapid development of technology, people have much more options, including watching television, to get knowledge from the endless sea of information, I disagree with the conclusion that reading books is not as important as it once was. In my point of view, reading is still of great significance for us all.

Admittedly, watching television is a valuable means for people to get information. First, compared to traditional books, television conveys knowledge in a more vivid way. For example, when you try to know about what a dinosaur looks like, one option is to look for a book concerning paleontology and finally builds up the image of dinosaur in your mind after spending a whole afternoon in library reading the abstract description; yet, if you open the television, just merely 5 minutes of watching enables you to even better know. Moreover, the television has an inherent advantage in broadcasting breaking news happening in possibly any moment. It’s hard to imagine without television, how might we get the news that Apollo 11 landed successfully on the moon and share the happiness of “That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind”.
However, the speaker overlooks several respects where books hold certain advantages over television. As we all know, television’s popularity is due to its appeal to the public, which, thus, leads to not only mainly conveying the information people are interested in rather than that meaningful and thoughtful, but also caring more about “now” instead of the whole history of human. On the contrary, books, as a traditional medium, have so long a history that it contains enough to inspire people see and think from a broader view and a longer time span.
In addition, some forms in books are not possible fully showed in television. For example, the famous novel In Search of Lost Time written by French novelist Marcel Proust, a notable work employing stream of consciousness, may only be understood by reading the original books. This illustrates the point that reading books and watching television are to such an extent different approaches of learning that the importance of reading books is not necessarily to be influenced by television when humans want to fully get the essence of great literary works.
Further, when it comes to a deeper meaning of learning, books are even more irreplaceable. Actually, to learn does not mean simply to get superficial knowledge passively by watching television leisurely without any thinking, which, I consider, is no more than just killing time. However, books consist of words, and words are abstract. So, reading books forces people to think; otherwise you were just looking at some separate words and didn’t know what it is saying. Also, it is continuous thinking that we human understand ourselves and the world around us better. As a famous writer Zhou Guoping, from Chinese Academy of Social Sciences once said and I paraphrase that books make people civil while television make savage. After all, only through thinking can us human beings distinct from animals. Therefore, we can conclude that in terms of the inheritance and development of our mankind, reading books has played and will go on assuming an important role.
In sum, the speaker’s claim overstates the importance of television, at least to some extent. When it comes to vividness of picture and timeliness of spreading breaking news, televisions have inherent advantages over books. But as for the contribution to the progress of human civilization, in general, reading books are more essential. In the final analysis, we should notice the very significance of reading books for learning, and at the same time exploit fully the benefit the age of television bring us to learn in a more efficient way as complementarity.