science

The Plug-In Drug

The Plug-In Drug is a science topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand The Plug-In Drug rather than just read about it. In short: The Plug-In Drug: Television, Children, And The Family is a book of social criticism written by Marie Winn and published in 1977 by Viking Press. In it, Winn brought the communications medium of television under withering fire, accusing it of wielding an addictive influence on the very young.

Key takeaways

The Plug-In Drug belongs to science; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect The Plug-In Drug to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of The Plug-In Drug from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

The Plug-In Drug: Television, Children, And The Family is a book of social criticism written by Marie Winn and published in 1977 by Viking Press. In it, Winn brought the communications medium of television under withering fire, accusing it of wielding an addictive influence on the very young.

Winn wrote: "The very nature of the television experience apart from the contents of the programs is rarely considered. Perhaps the ever-changing array of sights and sounds coming out of the machine--the wild variety of images meeting the eye and the barrage of human and inhuman sounds reaching the ear--fosters the illusion of a varied experience for the viewer. It is easy to overlook a deceptively simple fact: one is always watching television when one is watching television rather than having any other experience." A 25th-anniversary revision was published in 2002, which included new material that was subtitled "Television, Computers, And Family Life". Winn was even more hostile to the Internet and the World Wide Web than she had been to television itself twenty-five years before.

See also Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television, 1978 critique of television by Jerry Mander Amusing Ourselves to Death, 1985 critique of television by Neil Postman

References Harrington, Stephanie (March 20, 1977). "Does television hurt the head?; The Plug-in Drug". The New York Times. Retrieved 2009-01-12. Johnson, Nicholas (March 6, 1977). "TV's Child Is Full of Woe". The Washington Post. Retrieved 2009-01-12.{{cite news}}: CS1 maint: deprecated archival service (link) Shulins, Nancy (October 9, 1987). "Kicking the plug-in drug habit // One woman's crusade for surviving without TV". Chicago Sun-Times. Archived from the original on October 22, 2012. Retrieved 2009-01-12. "Winn, Marie. The Plug-In Drug: Television, Computers, and Family Life". May 1, 2002.

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with The Plug-In Drug

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what The Plug-In Drug claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In science, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to The Plug-In Drug before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about The Plug-In Drug ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of The Plug-In Drug

In research: The Plug-In Drug appears in science research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses The Plug-In Drug in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: The Plug-In Drug is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics 1977 English-language non-fiction books, 1977 non-fiction books, American non-fiction books, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for The Plug-In Drug outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study The Plug-In Drug in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what The Plug-In Drug means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain The Plug-In Drug out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is The Plug-In Drug in simple terms?

Why does The Plug-In Drug matter?

Because it connects several science ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study The Plug-In Drug?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on The Plug-In Drug.