Televised Illiteracy

Functional illiteracy has reached epidemic proportions in the United States. There are more than seven million illiterate Americans, more than twenty five million are unable to read well enough to complete a job application, or read a simple sentence.

As many as fifty million read at a fourth grade level. Nearly a third of the nation's population is illiterate or barely literate, and this number is growing rapildy. At least one third of high school and, surprisingly, college graduates never read another book after graduation.

Surveys indicated that in 2007 eighty per cent of American families neither bought nor read a book that year. And yet the United States is among the world's more literate countries. Mexico and Canada are worse.

At least part of the reading deficit in America can be attributed directly to television, which is based on images, not words, and has long been America's main mass communicatin medium, replacing newspapers.

The average Americn watches more than four hours of television a day. This adds up to more than a full day of TV out of every two weeks, or two solid months of viewing per year per person. Such people will have spent nine years in front of a TV by the they reach the age of sixty five.

These numbers are a tribute to the seductive capabilities of television, which transports us away from our dreary lives into a world of fabulous fantasy, where everyone is beautiful, and the stress and violence are shocking, stimulating, and vicarious.

We are made to feel closer to the people who really matter, celebrities. By so doing television confers a false sense of power, and becomes the final tuthority on what matters in life. The best way to strike a blow at the insanity of American culture, and to free oneself from manipulation by our corporate masters might well be the money saving measure of cancelling the cable.

There may still be time to get to the public library before the corporate sensors get their hands on it.

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