TV as a drug and mind-altering substance

As I read  from Jason Mittel's article, many other writers and anti-television campaigns associate the excessive television watching with using drugs as an addicted. They can be right in some ways. Drugs, whether they are  illicit or legal make its consumers stimulated or calm. Actually, television does the same thing too. After the couple of hours non-stop looking to the screen, it starts gaining the control over us. It changes our emotions, feelings and even behaviors just like drugs. In particular, soap operas, thrillers, science fictions may have an impact on us that we can not get easily rid of it. As a result, heavy watchers may lose their cognition and the ability of thinking logically. It is probably what television producers want. Viewers are forced to think in one way which producers prefer and indeed that makes viewers idiot.

The impact of TV on children

As Marie Winn reported on her article, no writers and scholars could foresee the future impacts of TV when it was first introduced to public. According to them the aim of  TV was simply to bring families together in one common place at home. However we have now a different situation here. Due to the technological developments, TV shifted from a luxury stuff to vital, necessary one. Today we can see every home at least 2 or 3 sets of TV. And families are getting isolated from each other because they watch their favourite shows on their own TV set. For instance, men enjoy watching football match while women are more interested in watching TV series. Naturally, it is a real damage to the development of children who live in a TV addicted family. Only watching TV every evening in a family kills the interaction among  children and parents. As a result, children find unintentionally new way which is TV(cartoons, special kid programmes etc.) to interact. They try to learn the real life from TV shows and actually TV is not the real life. After that, they can not know how to deal with real life problems. The worse is that, I saw on TV years ago. A kid jumped from window and died after watching "Pokemon". According to witnesses he identified himself with a pokemon and tried to fly like it. It is quite horrible story but unfortunely real.

Reality TV in Turkey

Since 2000  different kinds of reality TV shows were featured in our country. Some of them was successful and some of them were cancelled after a few episodes due to the lack of ratings. As I remember from my childhood, Turkish version of Big Brother attracted many audiences from different ages. Some TV channels were featuring it live and our curiosity about a couple of people's lives encouraged us to watch them all day long. Additionally there were special programmes which includes harsh debates among audiences in studio. 
Apart from that, pop star and talent shows became quite successful and they are still being watched by many. For years, I have seen many talents who can sing, dance etc. from these shows. However, almost all of them shared the same story and were forgotten
Despite of forgetting these shows and contestants, its impacts on audiences are getting worse day by day. I think people lose their "talent" of understanding political and global issues because of watching these shows. They do never care about the outside world unless they stop watching these silly shows.