It offers an easy way out of family conflict by eliminating opportunities for family members to get to know each other better. Friends and relatives visit less often, or if they do, there may be little communication as everyone sits and watches. The television set indeed hypnotizes and silences everybody in a room when it is on. Once this kind of thing is allowed to happen, the character of a home can actually change. In it, each person is still alone, isolated, centered on self.
Children especially are vulnerable to the effects of television.
They develop through their interaction with the people and environment around them. Turning on the television set can turn off the process that transforms children into people. We may assume that when we watch a program about sports, for example, we are in some sense participating in that activity ourselves. But that is an illusion. We have not run, climbed or perspired.