Chances are, they’re the same, so the victim will be none the wiser.

Once you’re in, let your imagination run wild. Usernames, passwords, personal emails, bank accounts, PayPal accounts, eBay accounts, Netflix accounts, subscription websites, social networks, all of their digital content is available at your fingertips. You are an E-God, reigning with a binary fist over their Digital Domain.

And from this point, the world wide web is at your beck and call, effortlessly manipulated by even your most spontaneous whim. You’ve become a digital gangster, and your ‘hood’ is controlled via Ethernet. Living in this modern age affords levels of luxury unattainable in previous generations. An LCD screen, glowing ominously in a pitch black room hundreds or thousands of miles away, navigated by a treacherous Internet-captain, could ruin your credit score, leaving you homeless and poor, kicked out the door, jobless and more, divorced, too, I’m sure.  You put on your best drawers and go hold up a convenience store, get tackled to the floor, and escape with no dignity left to implore. You should have chosen a jewelry store. Or chosen different passwords for secure accounts, because then maybe you wouldn’t be lying on the floor groping in the dark for discarded apple cores.

The concept of television, to many, is a strange and frightening thing. It conjures images of a Dark Plan to destroy the public’s free will, a tool of enslaving mindless drones for their Capitalist Army, a blemish on the smooth, pearl-white face of Creativity. The fat, greedy television moguls are locked in a constant war against Free Will as a concept and utilization of the wise and aware against their master trickery, with television their greatest weapon. The TV is America’s Little Boy and Personal Freedom is Hiroshima.

This train of thought is absolutely absurd; and those who perpetuate these lies are the harbinger of exactly what they claim to fear and fight. The exact phrase that sparked this retaliation was, “TV ruins kid’s [sic] creativity and makes people lazy.” The belief that being against television is a moral high ground that actively minded people are privy to is an ideal built on lies, and a contradiction of itself.

Television is a medium used for transmitting and receiving information (as is the Internet, and that would be another- longer- controversy altogether). I will accept the opinion that a portion of TV programming is pointless and inane (although the belief that it’s part of a larger conspiracy is brainless), but there’s a lot that isn’t. Asserting that a medium is responsible for how it may be sometimes utilized is preposterous to me; it’s like saying, “I’ll read anything, all books are good.” This is striking the same chord, a blanket statement either damning or praising, based on a conviction that part of one thing represents the whole of another. 