Mindless Show Effect

While television is a primary source for entertainment and advertisements, it is also often used as a tool for education as well as to get information across or to raise awareness. Due to its multi-sensorial appeal which uses the art of visual and audio senses, television has a powerful impact on people, especially on children, teens, and young adult. It is evident that a household would not or could not be complete without a television set. In Singapore, the percentage number of households with television set is 99.5% which means that nearly all the family has at least a television set, not forgetting that many of them would often contain more than one. As for the duration, the average time a person will spend watching television a day is

The Mindless. The mindless shows often result to have a greater degree of negative influence or impact on people than it has positively. The main catch is these shows do not have any significant value or meaning added to it. They are often for entertainment, and nothing really beyond that. Examples would be drama series, comedy/gag shows, and also commercial advertisements. Drama series often has interesting plots that induce the viewer to keep watching. However, the content usually just revolved around everyday life, relationship, and some unexpected ordeal that people might face. They get people addicted to following the drama daily, all the way till the last episode, but at the end of the day, there is nothing useful. Likewise for comedy and gag show. Commercial advertisements on the other hand, though not meant for entertainment, often mislead or brainwash viewers. They false advertise and uses propaganda heavily. This is especially so for fast food advertisement. For instance, some McDonalds commercial use children to promote foods that are high in fat, calories and carbs but call them healthy by packaging it with milk, corns, and apple wedges. Not only they promote unhealthy lifestyles to people, they contribute to social problem such as obesity. As suggested, this is one type of programme that is available on the television. Though shallow, meaningless, and in certain scenarios, creating undesirable consequences in a way that even we are oblivious to it, we cannot

The Motivational. Various reality competition shows involving singing, dancing, modelling and cooking can motivate people who are interested in the respective fields. For example, The Voice of China, one of the best rating show in china, is a Chinese reality talent show for singing. Other competitions would be Dance Academy, Top Chef, America’s Next Top Model and Project Runaway inspiring people who have a passion in dancing, cooking, modelling and fashion designing respectively. These reality competition shows are seen to change many people’s life when their talents got recognised and support from people. A handful of them ever since the competition became popular and got scouted by companies for their talent as well as for advertisement purposes. Not only do these shows provide people the opportunity and platform to be successful in what they enjoy doing, they also motivate people watching the show giving them hope. Instead of the ‘safe and secure’ jobs many people are having, these shows encourage people to step out of their comfort zone and have the courage to actually pursue their dream.

Through such classification of television shows, we can see that the content under each category differs greatly from entertaining to motivating. With almost half of our leisure time glued to the television set, we would probably want to spend the time wisely by watching programmes that are either useful, meaningful or insightful, something that is relevant. Therefore, the classified