Why all the fuss over television? It is blamed for an assortment of evils, including violence, shortened attention spans, the decline of literacy and political indoctrination. In this scintillating and approachable book, Ellis Cashmore weighs up the theories and evidence. He argues that much of the panic is without foundation and that the single most important danger posed by TV is that it encourages us to spend too much. Cashmore agrees with many writers that television is an elemental force in today's culture, but he offers us a completely different account of how and why this has come about.