Summary and Response Essay - Pnina Grossman

TV & Reefer Madness

            In her article, Television: the Plug in Drug, journalist Marie Winn argues that the presence and prevalence of television in modern society has led to the decay of family life. To support her claim, Winn relies mostly on her conjecture and analysis, supported with anecdotal evidence from teachers, therapists and parents. Her purpose is to make people aware of the powerful influence that television can have on the family dynamic in order to allow them to take control of this influence and their own family dynamic. As such, the author uses an authoritative tone to instruct the audience of parents and other adult authority figures that dealing with this problem should be a priority.

            The tone in this paper is the first thing that brings the reader to ask – what expertise and authority does Winn have that enables her to define the ideal family dynamic and how does she know that television is disrupting it? Both questions don’t find easy answers within the piece, which makes the cautious reader uneasy in accepting Winn’s claims. Winn seems to have some ideal image of a perfect family dynamic in her mind, but she does not enlighten the reader as to what that perfect dynamic is besides for noting that television has disrupted family rituals. Additionally, Winn mentions that some other factors that have previously contributed to “the decline of family life in America” are “the rising divorce rate, the increase in the number of working mothers, the trends towards people moving far away from home, [and] the breakdown of neighborhoods and communities.” While this also hints at what Winn’s idea of a perfect family dynamic entails, the factors included show that Winn’s idea of a family does not include many modern, and happy, modern families who might have working mothers or find themselves spanning larger distances then just the area around the patriarch and matriarch’s house.

            Even with an idea of Winn’s ideal family, it is unclear that television is disrupting the dynamic of this family on a large scale, as Winn claims it is. The evidence Winn brings to support her claims is almost entirely anecdotal: a teacher talking about a mother who does not spend time with her daughter because of television, a therapist describing a family where the problems are masked by television, and a young woman talking about how her family rituals disappeared due to television. On an individual level, these stories might be unpleasant, but Winn does not produce statistics or expert opinions to prove that these stories are the rule and not the exception. Furthermore, Winn seems to conflate a family that owns a television with a family that spends all of their free time watching television, once again, without bringing in statistics to back up this claim.

            Though the reader of this essay might instinctively agree with Winn’s position on television coming in to the article, the judgmental tone of the piece and its lack of proof make it hard for the reader to leave the piece agreeing with Winn. Most readers are likely to feel defensive when encountering Winn’s simultaneously vague yet narrow definition of what a good family dynamic consists of, which make them less likely to want to be convinced by her argument. Had Winn marshalled statistics to support her claim, the reader would have had no choice but to agree with it, despite whatever personal feelings the reader had, but left supported only by anecdotal evidence, Winn’s piece is more likely to make people disagree with her claim than agree with it.