Television is Bad For You

It is a content problem, television is a wonderful medium for learning and can be used in school because it holds the children's attention better I'm sure. The problem lies in the nature of programme production for radio, TV, magazines etc. It is competitive, therefore there is the urge to make your programme most eye/ear catching. Its like the influential nature of art with an unhealthy addition of trying to out do each other by relating your production better to the audience, this seems to shadow aiming for superior, original, up to date or more intelligent content. So it's no surprise children's attention span is desensitized by this aggressively competitive streak, it is reflected in the attention grabbing, colourful, loud and hard-hitting productions of today, from films to children's television, reality pales in comparison.


Dan.

Watch some television on mute for a while. Pay attention to how much is going on at once (like CNN's 'The Situation Room') and how often the cameras cut from one view to another, or from scene to scene.

Content makes us lazy.

Content is a problem with television, but I do not think content is the cause of the reduced attention span.

I would cite the quick cuts. Watch some television on mute for a while. Pay attention to how much is going on at once (like CNN's 'The Situation Room') and how often the cameras cut from one view to another, or from scene to scene.

Content makes us lazy, but the practice of not focusing on anything for more than a short moment is the root of the attention problems.

I would cite the quick cuts

I for example love to watch Showtime's Dexter and Nickelodeons Invader Zim

Watch some television on mute for a while

Have you ever read Fahrenheit 451?

The content has an effect on the knowledge of people. Someone reading a random book like say "The Catcher in the Rye" absorbs more knowledge from that 192 page book than someone watching a Marathon of Spongebob Squarepants episodes.

Of course it's not problematic to watch TV once in a while, I for example love to watch Showtime's Dexter and Nickelodeons Invader Zim just to relax a bit. But like everything you have to watch yourself not to get addicted like many people are these days to TV and watch about everything.

That's what I was trying imply with most 'eye/ear catching'; one of my biggest gripes with modern cinema is that I see a complete lack of story telling, replaced with camera angles, but also constant sting quartet drones to keep us constantly on edge (Lost) or whatever.

No. My pessimism and criticism of society and culture is strong enough as it is.

Worth the read?

I don't have the resources handy, but apparently as television destroys attention span, reading builds it up.

And you're right, we do not learn much from TV. We learn far more from reading.

Absolutely. I watch television, probably more than I should, but none the less. It's all about self control.

You're right about that. Art has been left behind by money.

When I was a pediatrics resident, I went to a lecture by an expert on media violence and its effect on child behavior (which is actually strikingly strong). He showed all these examples of violent movies and video games and directly imitative behavior in kids, as well as more violent behavior with more intense exposure.

Turns out that this lecture was from 8AM to 9AM EDT on the morning of 9/11/01, and we emerged from the lecture into the children's hospital waiting rooms where little kids and their families were staring at the TV coverage of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Not all media violence is fiction, unfortunately.

I think this is discussable. I did not went on the highway and trow bananas and turtle shells on other cars because i played Mario Kart on the DS.

I give the fact that someone who is "weaker" and has had a somewhat discussable eduction might start to hit people with hammer after playing a game like manhunt.

9/11 was passive violence, and far less dangerous to the child's mind than let's say the standard violence you can expect in a Tarantino movie, or a rockstar game in which you are the torturer.

I also want to say that people should stop *****ing about 9/11 as if it has been the worst thing in human history, far more worse things have happened. But that is beside the point I'm making here.

Neither did I. That doesn't change the fact that on a population level, and controlling for all other major variables, exposure to media violence is an independent risk factor for violent behavior among children. There is a lot of epidemiologic evidence for this. But it's not the only variable, of course, and why it happens to some is an even bigger question.

This comes up with things like Columbine or Virginia Tech. How do you find out which young people are at greatest risk of violent behavior?

Well, there are certainly going to be subgroups that are at higher risk than others. ALL children are impressionable, but the ones more likely to be violent are probably the ones who don't have good resources at home to help put exposure to violence in its place.

True, except that knowing that thousands of real people had died and feeling vulnerable is something you don't experience in a game. People don't generally end up with post-traumatic stress disorder after playing Doom. But people can end up like that after a minor car accident. When you're scared it has a very different effect.

I hope you're not mentioning this because you've gotten that impression from me. As the grandson of four Holocaust survivors I know what the difference is. But be fair -- it was probably the single most memorable news experience in most of our lives -- it stands out the way the Kennedy assassination stood out for our parents. It's altered our culture (for worse) in the last 7 years, not because it was such a benign event but because it really was that traumatic for us.

If kids don't get told these things are fake, they will believe it as truth.

Given rough estimates but there were only a few hundred thousand to a million people in NY at the time.

All the other people watched it on TV, and thereby only had a passive experience.

Often 9/11 is used in the form of "Worst thing that has ever happened".

Not to be offensive, but being a grandson of holocaust survivors does not make you a holocaust survivor too

That's not true. Children as young as 4 years old are able to independently differentiate truth from fantasy, which is why it becomes a major part of their play.

Uh, there are 7 million people in NYC proper and about 14 million in metropolitan NY. I lived in Connecticut at the time and there were LOTS of news reports that there were other hijacked planes flying overhead (because we were midway between NYC and Boston, where two of the flights had taken off from)

I'd suggest you read the following journal articles. They are studies of the effect of media exposure to 9/11, the Oklahoma City bombing, the 2004 Tsunami, and the anthrax attacks on people who were geographically distant from the event and exposed only through the media. There is an unambiguous increase in anxiety disorders including PTSD with exposure only through the media.

Who said that?

I didn't claim I was. But I DO know what it means for someone to be scarred by something like that, and it helps me appreciate the difference between something of the magnitude of the Holocaust as opposed to something the magnitude of 9/11

-- and I understand it well because I've grown up with this omnipresent in our family. My grandparents lost their entire families, they were starved, beaten, tortured, and this was over a span of years. There were no resources for emotional support, no massive sympathy, no war on their behalf. Nothing about 9/11 meets those criteria.

But be fair -- 9/11 was not exactly some trivial news story either. It's annoying in that it becomes so synonymized with Bush and the catastrophe that he's created, but it was a tragic and important event.

The obligation of parents is to make sure their kids stay away from the stuff the cannot handle.

As you say; MEDIA EXPOSURE, the fact that your local newscaster says Bush has been the best president ever does not make it true.

In this notion the majority of Americans are downright dumb.

Many, many American I have spoken to in the last few years. If you were to go to the more red-neck parts of America it often gets worse.

You can only imagine what it is to be from their stories, you do not know until you are in their shoes. I understand you find both horrible and I do not imply otherwise.

It has been done before by America to gain a legal entrance to World War II, that time a Cruise Ship (I cannot recall the name right now) was sunk by guess who, the Nazi's, who in modern times have been replace by Terrorists.

Thanks for the thoughts, Vasska,

AND to provide a supportive environment to cope with the things they get exposed to anyway, of course. That's what growth and development is -- it's a constant stream of new experiences. But there is no way to make a parent good at it. I mean I now have a 6 week old son, and not even being a pediatrician makes this easy.

These studies (the 9/11 ones) concentrate on the repeated images of the towers collapsing. You could argue that it was propagandized and it was certainly overdone, but it's the images and not the loudmouth psychopaths on cable news who really affected people during that first week.

That's a pretty extreme thing to say about 300 million people, even though I realize that you're probably overstating the stereotype. If the majority of Americans are downright dumb, then do you disagree with the oh 75% of us who disapprove of Bush and who think the war was a mistake?

And have you ever considered that your opinion of us is just as distorted by the quality of your news as our opinions are by our news?

Which "red-neck" parts of America have you been to? I live in North Carolina now, and you may find this hard to believe but there was far more hysteria about terrorism in Boston than there is in North Carolina. I was nearly arrested by the Boston Marine Police for taking a picture of the new bridge on the Charles River. These stereotypes just aren't accurate. The most paranoid parts of the country are the big cities, especially NYC, Washington DC, Chicago, Boston, LA, and San Francisco, all of which I've been to many times since 9/11.

I'm NOT claiming to have been there. But to spend my life seeing how it's affected them, learning stories that no one else knows, and seeing how my own interface with the world is informed by their lives, is first hand experience, even if their actual lives and survival are second hand.

I hate to be nitpicky, but you're a bit mistaken about your European history here.

Nazi Germany declared war on the United States a day or two after Pearl Harbor was attacked by Japan in December, 1941. The US would have probably found its way into the war eventually anyway, but it had nothing to do with a cruise ship.

You are thinking of the Lusitania, which was sunk by a German submarine in 1915 during the first World War, which needless to say was under the Kaiser and not the Nazis. But this was NOT used as an excuse to enter WWI. The importance of the Lusitania was that the US became very polarized against Germany, whereas it had been very neutral before.

The final straw by which the US entered WWI (in 1917) was the Zimmerman telegram in which Berlin tried to convince Mexico to attack the US.

But I'm just a dumb American, what would I know about the history of Europe.