Post by RS Davis on Apr 22, 2004 16:17:20 GMT -5
[glow=red,2,300]Nick Gillespie Wrote:[/glow] To hear the TV Turnoff folks tell the tale, we're mesmerized from infancy onwards by the bright blinking lights and dazzling displays. In fact, this year's televisual fast has benefited from a recently released study the purports to show a link between watching TV and developing attention deficit disorder. Even though the authors of the study flatly state, "We have not in fact studied or found an association between television viewing and clinically diagnosed ADHD," you get the idea: TV is bad for kids and other living creatures because it, in the words of New York Daily News columnist Lenore Skenazy, rewires our brains.
"If the brain gets too exposed to all the hoopla of TV," summarizes Skenazy, "even 'educational' TV, it may start to register this frantic pace as normal. Anything less exciting—like school—becomes too dull to focus on. So it just makes sense to turn off your kids' TV." Give her credit for bashing PBS along with the Power Rangers, even as Skenazy (and the study's authors) recapitulate age-old complaints about relatively new genres of popular culture. The infamous Fredric Wertham said almost exactly the same thing about comic books, likening them to spicy food that ruined young palates for more cultivated tastes. Centuries before that, mostly male critics of new-fashioned novels fretted that such texts were corrupting the imaginations of mostly female readers, so filling them up with fantasies of travel and strong emotions that the ladies would never be able to function properly in polite society. And long, long, before that, Plato banned poets from his utopia because they stirred up the "passions."
What might be called the "hoopla explanation" is an ancient one, but does it answer Benjamin Loxley's query: "Why don't we turn off the TV for the other 51 weeks of the year?" There's a shorter and a longer answer to that question, neither of which is any more satisfying than the weekly tribal council meeting on Survivor. The shorter one, stripping away the moralism embedded in stunts like TV Turnoff Week, is that we simply don't want to turn off the TV. That's not because we're weak-willed. Though a particularly resilient whipping boy for all the ills of society, television has flourished because as a storytelling medium, it has allowed an unprecedented amount of information to circulate in ways that people find meaningful and useful. TV may not be particularly helpful as a substitute for a parent, or a friend, or a babysitter, but like poetry and novels, it has created a common space for pleasure and expression.
"If the brain gets too exposed to all the hoopla of TV," summarizes Skenazy, "even 'educational' TV, it may start to register this frantic pace as normal. Anything less exciting—like school—becomes too dull to focus on. So it just makes sense to turn off your kids' TV." Give her credit for bashing PBS along with the Power Rangers, even as Skenazy (and the study's authors) recapitulate age-old complaints about relatively new genres of popular culture. The infamous Fredric Wertham said almost exactly the same thing about comic books, likening them to spicy food that ruined young palates for more cultivated tastes. Centuries before that, mostly male critics of new-fashioned novels fretted that such texts were corrupting the imaginations of mostly female readers, so filling them up with fantasies of travel and strong emotions that the ladies would never be able to function properly in polite society. And long, long, before that, Plato banned poets from his utopia because they stirred up the "passions."
What might be called the "hoopla explanation" is an ancient one, but does it answer Benjamin Loxley's query: "Why don't we turn off the TV for the other 51 weeks of the year?" There's a shorter and a longer answer to that question, neither of which is any more satisfying than the weekly tribal council meeting on Survivor. The shorter one, stripping away the moralism embedded in stunts like TV Turnoff Week, is that we simply don't want to turn off the TV. That's not because we're weak-willed. Though a particularly resilient whipping boy for all the ills of society, television has flourished because as a storytelling medium, it has allowed an unprecedented amount of information to circulate in ways that people find meaningful and useful. TV may not be particularly helpful as a substitute for a parent, or a friend, or a babysitter, but like poetry and novels, it has created a common space for pleasure and expression.
