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<title> TELEVISION - A CURSE OR A BLESSING? </title>
Four years of my life have been spent without television. During those years I never felt that I missed anything. Rather I was happy and satisfied with my choice. Many times people wondered how I could manage to live without television. My response was always to hand that question back to them and a bit humorously ask how they could manage to live with it. Today my circumstances are different and I have no choice but to live with television. Of course I have the choice of switching the thing on or off, but what I mean is that the decision of its mere presence or not is beyond my power. If I could choose, though, I would stick to my determination of living without it. If you would ask me why, my simple answer would be that I don't want to waste my time. Because that is what I think television often is, a waste and a great time-consumer.

Surely television must be seen as one of the very best among time-consumers. Recently I read a report made by the Swedish board of Education, which showed that an average pupil in classes 5-8 is spending about three hours a day in front of the TV. One must admit that it is pretty interesting to find that people still have time to watch TV in a society where effectiveness is measured in minutes and even seconds. How come students have so much time to sit in front of the television when they don't have any time for their homework? Or maybe that is the reason. Television has the capacity to get one's attention and then take the life and energy out of oneself as something like a big black hole. The weary person who only wants to relax a bit after a hard day's work easily finds himself even more tired after having been in touch with this "screen monster". Surely television is a master to create apathy and emptiness. One doesn't have to go further than oneself to realise that is true. How often have I not wasted hours in front of the television just because of tiredness and a need for rest before setting about my required tasks? What was thought to be a short time has often become hours and time has been wasted.

Another interesting feature that I find when it comes to television is how we tend to build friendly relationships based on it. This might sound a bit odd, but believe me it is true. How many times have I not been invited to someone with the intention of spending an evening together? Tell about my surprise when I after a while realise that our time together is limited to our mutual starring at an electric box. Is that what one call fruitful relationships? Today television is about to create a whole society where people have strong difficulties to build deep and stable relationships. Why? The reason is lack of communication. Real fellowship is always based on good communication. And how can one build anything like that when one's time of active discourse is limited to the different commercial breaks and then tend to be all about the ongoing movie? Don't misunderstand me, though. Of course watching a film together with one's friends has its place. The big problem is when we make that all there is to our friendship. And today that has become a real danger.

With this in mind it is easy to look upon television as a mere curse. That would be a strong generalisation, though. Surely our consumption of television carries many dangers. But television in itself should neither be treated as a curse nor a blessing. It is our consumption of it that determines what it will become. The challenge is therefore not so much to separate ourselves totally from all there is to television, as it is to learn to control our intake. As long as we let the TV master us it will be our enemy and always cause us a great deal of struggle. But if we learn how to rule over the television it will be a tool that will give us good assistance. The challenge therefore is to turn the curse into blessing by limiting and controlling the consumption. Our level of success of that will determine our future.
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