‘Winston turned a switch and the voice sank somewhat, though
the words were still distinguishable. The instrument could be
dimmed, but there was no way of shutting it off completely…
Winston kept his back turned to the telescreen”
From 1984 by George Orwell.
In 1948, George Orwell wrote a book “Nineteen Eighty-Four”
about a society in which it was a crime not to watch television.
Television told the people what to think, it even acted as a
portal for thought-police to spy on the citizenry. In a free
society, nothing forces anyone to watch TV. However one in ten
adults have five or more televisions in their home according to
the Office for National Statistics, with nearly a quarter watching
TV between 2-3 hours per day. One in ten people view
television more than 7 hours per day. By the age of seventy-
five, most people in the UK would have spent more than 12
years watching television. It has become the industrialised world
main activity, taking up more time than any other single activity
except work and sleep.
Throughout all the radical measures put forward by the UK
government to improve the health of the nation there is no
mention of the health issues linked with the role of watching
television inclusive of restrictive brain development and
Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) in children,
positive links with Alzheimer’s disease in the elderly and also it
being a major cause of depression and sleep disturbances.
There is a plethora of negative direct links both physiologically
and psychologically from watching television and whatever
happens to us individually from actively doing this, twelve years
is a considerable amount of our lives to be taken from us.
Instead of these being days of our lives they have truly
become ‘daze of our lives’.
I am currently studying a PhD in photography. My work is developed from research, and is constructed by means of created images with a suggestive narrative in response to a variety of issues shaped by our social, domestic, cultural and political environment.
