In the United States, where there are almost seventy-five million homes with TV, the average eighteen-year-old has spent more hours (15,000) before television than in school. An environment has been spawned in which writers write with a view to having their work used on television.

“When TV moved to the forefront of the popular consciousness, the sense of literary tradition began to disappear from American writers,” author Norman Mailer charged at a Yale University symposium. Why work your heart out for literary excellence when a steamy, sexy plot, spun in a flashy style, will sell to television for more money than it will bring in book form? Besides​—who reads books anymore?

Do you realize what a robber of our intellect television can be? TV, like the movies, comes at us through our eyes and through our ears. It totally dominates our two major senses. It stages the action. It commands the whole field of attention. What thinking is done is done by it. It carries the ball every exploratory inch of the way, every imaginative moment of the time. We don’t need to think or care or wonder or question. We huddle before it, reduced to mental zombies, not exercising our own thinking abilities.

Words solidified in writing (print), unlike the fleeting image on the TV screen, are permanent. We can pause as we read them. We can turn back to them. We can meditate, ponder, draw conclusions from what they tell us, learn a lesson, stretch and flex our mental abilities in the process. But without realizing it our mental reflexes may become flabby, even retarded, by long and continuous diversion to television. Our attention span may become abbreviated. Television with its intensely concentrated scenes, fractured every few minutes by commercial breaks, may condition us to tire prematurely from prolonged concentration. Our intellectual staying power may become exhausted.