September 2008

Godfrey Reggio’s, Evidence.

The blank, comatose look. I’ve seen it myself. You can easily witness it too. Just watch your kids watching TV. Give them a few minutes to settle into it. It’s like watching a person go under hypnosis. I know that feeling too. I used to watch more TV myself years ago, even as an adult.

The debate always seems to be raging if television is good or bad for you and your family. What is it that people are looking for as proof? Dead brain cells? Some measure in the drop in intelligence that can be correlated with television watching? Given the number of variables that influences a persons cognitive ability, I don’t know that we could ever isolate television as an influence.

I certainly don’t want to subject my kids to being part of that study at any rate.

Stephen Dubner (Freakonomics co-author) blogged yesterday about What TV Does to You, with an image of a kid silhouetted against a glowing TV.

I am inclined to agree with him that educational TV has benefits. I like the technology. But the average American isn’t watching over 4.5 hours of educational TV daily. Most of them are watching crap. And most kids who spend hours in front of the TV are watching Nickelodeon, Disney Channel, and Cartoon Network.

The highlight of Dubner’s post is this excerpt which he took from a friends book:

That last year in New Haven, I could go out to friends’ houses more or less when I wanted to and watch television as often as I liked, only to find that now I agreed with my mother about TV. I had begun not to like what happened to me when I watched.

Given the chance, I stared like a guppy, immobilized for hours in somebody’s den on an increasingly itchy wall-to-wall carpet, intent on things I didn’t even enjoy, passive and yet also anxious, too aware of how soon the hour would be up when the little world in front of me would evaporate and I’d have nothing left but an uneasy regret and another new show beginning that I couldn’t get up and walk away from.

It was so easy not to resist because television was doing all the work for me, making all the decisions. That was especially true, I noticed, when I watched baseball. The field became reduced to the fragment that fit on the screen, minimizing the game into a fraction of itself, implying that everything happening off-camera was irrelevant. The players were minimized as well, because they did not exist unless the ball came their way. Then the lens swooped into their faces and there was too much of them — which weirdly created distance.

This nails it. I’ve had the same feelings. After turning off the TV after being sucked into a few hours of aimless channel surfing, I would think to myself, “Wow. I just wasted a few hours.” Things seemed interesting at first, and I would land on a channel, watch for a bit, move on to another channel. Maybe I did get sucked into something for a full hour. But when it was over, I thought, “That was lame.” I would recognize that I felt a bit drained. I bit disappointed that I wasted that time. I finally realized this and just about gave up TV. I still maintain a Netflix account and will watch the occasional movie. I still watch educational shows with my kids. But I still have to limit and sometimes pry my son off of Nickelodeon, Disney and Cartoon Network.

I still tell him that it’s going to shrink his brain. I don’t care what the researchers say on this one. I know it in my gut. I know what TV can do to a person in the short term if they watch low quality programming, so-called entertainment, or sit in front of it for too long even watching the better programming.

Instead of debating good or bad, maybe all we really need to do is ask ourselves, “Is there something my kid can be doing for these one or two hours that would be much better for them than watching TV?”

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