Issue38,限时,先谢谢大家了！

jetflameUID: 206544

TOPIC: ISSUE38 - "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."
WORDS: 487          TIME: 0:45:00          DATE: 2006-7-22

In the age of television, can people learn just by watching television instead of reading books? I concede that in this age of multimedia, television is more and more popular in transportation of information and knowledge. However, I can not agree with the speaker's assertion in that books are still the only source for our formal learning process.

Admittedly, more and more types of knowledge can be displayed on TV and the vivid pictures and lively video programs appeal to the mass much more than written books. On one hand, most people choose to watch TV rather than reading a novel in contemporary world. Composed by video and sound, TV programs are much more interesting than reading a book which needs people to imagine, too hard for somebody. On the other hand, in this era of rapid social and technological progress making people's life colorful and complexity, TV show is more appropriate for the description of daily life and new knowledge. For instance, given that a professor want to introduce the genetic technology to the mass, writing a book on the relevant knowledge will probably help less in making the public aware of that technology, while combining the knowledge with a TV program will inform the audience both effectively and efficiently.

However, in my point of view, books are still the major resource from which we learn strict and precise knowledge. Clearly, it is the characteristics of books which strongly support this idea. Understandably, books are more formal than TV programs and therefore, sophisticated and subjective knowledge can be well recorded in them. To the contrary, TV programs only use pictures and sound to provide information, which indicates that only surface and simple knowledge can be broadcast. In short, books are suitable for hard and precise knowledge and TV are suitable for providing easy and modern knowledge involving multimedia. It is unwise to put all learning process on TV show.

Another problem with learning from TV involves the vary kinds of programs. Besides the programs which major on teaching the public practical knowledge, there are a great many programs aim at pure entertainment which, however, hardly combines any useful knowledge. Moreover, it is the entertainment programs that most attract people to watch TV other than knowledge involved ones. In that case, merely motivated by entertainment, people will certainly not choose to watch the science programs, let alone learning from TV instead of reading books.

In sum, there are several other aspects relevant to the issue under discussion, which, unfortunately, I have no time to explore in detail. But the above-discussed contents should to a large extent justify my claim that book is still the stable ground on which we always stand and gain knowledge from whatever television's influence will be. Without books, our human beings are just like the fish lack of water, the bird losing the sky, and the plant pulled out of the earth.