I recall telling a friend back in 1984 how music videos would have a much greater impact if they were accompanied by visual images that flew by at a speed people's brains could barely comprehend. It didn't occur to me that that might be a bad thing for a segment of the population - I was just thinking of the earlier efforts toward subliminal advertising.
From my experience, TV also seems to be decreasing the IQs of adults as well.
Ya think?
Yeah, blame it on TV, music videos, video games, Bush, etc. Anything but proper parenting; heaven forbid we should blame anything on the parents.
Watching TV may hurt toddlers' attention spans
Researchers say there is 'no safe level' of viewing
(American Academy of Pediatrics - US Study)
April 5, 2004
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4664749
But I would not be surprised if quality shows with good plots and character developement actually increased a child's intelligence.
I think what they are really seeing is that parents who care so little about interacting with their child that they let the TV be the baby sitter, are having more problem children than parents who are otherwise.
Excuse me, I was listening to the TV. What did ya'll say?
What's with this HTTP 404-File Not Found stuff?
I am clearly seeing this in the classroom. Clearly.
Reminds me of the observations of Marshall McLuhan in the days of TV infancy. Not that I necessarily agree or even understand all of them. Like:
With telephone and TV it is not so much the message as the sender that is being sent.
With the radio and television we have simultaneous access to events on the entire planet. However, television culture diminishes, or amputates, many of the close ties of family life based on oral communication. The simple act of turning on a television can reduce a room of people to silence.
When McLuhan said that the medium is the message, he was trying to raise an alarm. Big debates over the content of media - such as the controversies over sex and violence on television - miss the point entirely, he argued, because the transformation of human life is carried on by the form of the medium rather than any specific program transmitted by it. Protesting the programs carried by the media is futile because the owners of the media are always happy to give the public exactly what it wants. Standing in opposition to any sort of programming is not only a lonely and isolating posture, it also serves to advance the popularity of the programming protested.
Television brought the brutality of war into the comfort of the living room. Vietnam was lost in the living rooms of America - not on the battlefields of Vietnam.
When producers want to know what the public wants, they graph it as curves. When they want to tell the public what to get, they say it in curves.
"Electromagnetic technology requires utter human docility and quiescence of meditation such as befits an organism that now wears its brain outside its skull and its nerves outside its hide. Man must serve his electronic technology with the same servo-mechanistic fidelity with which he served his coracle, his canoe, his typography, and all other extensions of his physical organs. But there is this difference, that previous technologies were partial and fragmentary, and the electric is total and inclusive.... No further acceleration is possible this side of the light barrier."
In our cool electronic culture, every message is repeated over and over, like spam in your e-mail box. "One can stop anywhere after the first few sentences and have the full message, if one is prepared to 'dig' it," wrote McLuhan, who was fond of repeating a slogan he claimed to have gotten from IBM: "Information overload = pattern recognition."
Not about electronic media, but I feel like posting them:
The more the data banks record about each one of us, the less we exist.
People don't actually read newspapers. They step into them every morning like a hot bath.
If it works, it's obsolete.
The future of the book is the blurb.
Glad to see this research coming back around. Parents - wonder where your kids get ADHD? Turn off the TV! Especially for very young children. Get them outside of the 'box'.
Bump for later read.
