Personally, I think that human beings like to rest when they can and television gives them the perfect opportunity. Like any tool, society adjusts to its presence and all of a sudden there are events surrounding the presences of the new tool. I mean, can you imagine the impact the invention of the drum had on early humans? Think of the social consequences. TV is like that...only easier for most people to work with.

You sit there conserving calories that in evolutionary terms might be needed at any moment. It's an excuse to lounge around, to avoid all the stress in the environment. The fact that you can sit and stare at a TV and realize that, yep, there will be food on the table tomorrow is not addiction.

Addiction is when your life suffers because of abuse of something. You are abusing yourself and possibly your social support structure in the case of addiction. So, addiction depends on your perspective. If you are happy watching TV and don't much miss anything else and you function okay then, really, it's not an addiction, is it?

The real danger from TV, in my opinion, is the homogeneity it brings to human cultures. It is building a huge mono culture out of what once was an incredibly diverse human experiment. And the danger is not necessarily in homogeneity per se but that in some area of the mono culture something is missing or lacking that is required for human survival. That is the great risk, that we'll become one culture, all of us, but because we do we miss some concept, some way of looking at the world that was important to our survival but we failed to notice it or failed to retain it. The idea of eating dinner with the family and talking about how the day went is one of the things that may well be lost. That connection to those around us might slip away. It certainly seems to in many families who begin to value less and less genetic connection and value more and more iconic relationships; the branding of ourselves to lend meaning to our lives.

The same threat arises from the Internet...but in a much lesser way since we can talk back to the Internet and often get responses, sometimes even thoughtful ones. TV does not do that, but it wastes less physiological energy than surfing the Internet I'm guessing...and hence TV's seductive power to influence its "captive" audience. You become a couch potato since it saves energy but eventually, if you aren't expending energy to actually learn anything meaningful, you turn into an ignorant idiot who doesn't know square one about how to survive. That danger grows as modern society learns to put food on the table in gigantic quantities and folks begin to believe that they don't really have to know much about surviving and all that has gone to put that food there before them to snack on during The Virtual Game Show.