The Plug-In Drug: Television, Children, And The Family is a book of social criticism written by Marie Winn

Marie Winn

Marie Winn, a journalist, author and birdwatcher, is known for her books and articles on the birds of Central Park, her Wall Street Journal ornithology column and her role in the quiz show scandals of the 1950s...

 and published in 1977 by Viking Penguin Publications with the ISBN 0 14 00.7698 0. In it, Winn brought the communications medium of television

Television

Television is a telecommunication medium for transmitting and receiving moving images that can be monochrome or colored, with accompanying sound...

 under withering fire, accusing it of wielding an addictive influence on the very young.

Wrote Winn:

"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."

In her 2002 update of The Plug-In Drug, a 25th-anniversary revision including new material that was subtitled "Television, Computers, And Family Life," Winn was even more hostile to the Internet

Internet

The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite to serve billions of users worldwide...

 and the World Wide Web

World Wide Web

The World Wide Web is a system of interlinked hypertext documents accessed via the Internet...

than she had been to television itself twenty-five years before.