 "Although the new victory over time and space represents an impressive enrichment of the perceptual world, it also favors the cult of sensory stimulation, which is characteristic of the cultural attitude of our time. Proud of our inventions -photography, the phonograph, film, radio- we praise the educational virtues of direct experience. We believe in traveling, and use pictures and movies in the schools. But as we render man's image of his world more complete and accurate than it was in the past, we also restrict the realm of the spoken and the written word and thereby the realm of thinking. The more perfect our means of direct experience, the more easily we are caught by the dangerous illusion that perceiving is tantamount to knowing and understanding. Television is a new, hard test of our wisdom. If we succeed in mastering the new medium it will enrich us. But it can also put our mind to sleep. We must not forget that in the past the inability to transport immediate experience and to convey it to others made the use of language necessary and thus compelled the human mind to develop concepts. For in order to describe things one must draw the general from the specific; one must select, compare, think. When communication can be achieved by pointing with the finger, however, the mouth grows silent, the writing hand stops, and the mind shrinks."
-Rudolf Arnheim, Film as Art, 1935: A Forecast of Television, 1957, page 195."We risk being the first people in history to have been able to make their illusions so vivid, so persuasive, so 'realistic' that they can live in them. We are the most illusioned people on earth. Yet we dare not become disillusioned, because our illusions are the very house in which we live; they are our news, our heroes, our adventure, our forms of art, our very experience." -Daniel Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America, 1961, page 240."We are a culture that has been denied, or has passively given up, the linguistic and intellectual tools to cope with complexity, to separate illusion from reality. We have traded the printed word for the gleaming image. Public rhetoric is designed to be comprehensible to a ten-year old child or an adult with a six grade reading level. Most of us speak at this level, are entertained and think at this level.... And a culture dominated by images and slogans seduces those who are functionally literate but who make the choice not to read. There have been other historical periods with high rates of illiteracy and vast propaganda campaigns. But not since the Soviet and fascist dictatorships, and perhaps the brutal authoritarian control of the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages, has the content of information been as skillfully and ruthlessly controlled and manipulated... Knowledge is confused with how we are made to feel. Life is a state of permanent amnesia, a world in search of new forms of escapism and quick, sensual gratification...Kings, queens, and emperors once used their court conspiraces to divert their subjects. Today cinematic, political, and journalistic celebrities distract us with their personal foibles and scandals. They create our public mythology...In an age of images and entertainment, in an age of instant emotional gratification, we neither seek nor want honesty or reality. Reality is complicated. Reality is boring. We are incapable or unwilling to handle its confusion. We ask to be indulged and comforted by cliches, sterotypes, and inspirational messages that tell us we can be whoever we seek to be, that we live in the greatest country on earth, that we are endowed with superior moral and physical qualities, and that our future will always be glorious and prosperous...The ability to amplify lies, to repeat them and have surrogates repeat them in endless loops of news cycles, give lies and mythical narratives the aura of uncontested truth." -Chris Hedges, Empire of Illusion, 2009, page 44, 45, 49.Brown, A. (2011). Media use by children younger than 2 years. Pediatrics, 128(5), 1040-1045. In 1999, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) issued a policy
statement addressing media use in children. The purpose
of that statement was to educate parents about the
effects that media—both the amount and the content—may have on children.
In one part of that statement, the AAP recommended
that “pediatricians should urge parents to avoid television viewing for
children under the age of two years.” The wording
of the policy specifically discouraged media use in this age group, although it is frequently misquoted by media outlets as no
media exposure in this age group. The AAP believed that there were
significantly more potential negative effects of media
than positive ones for this age group and, thus,
advised families to thoughtfully consider media use for infants. This
policy
statement reaffirms the 1999 statement with respect
to media use in infants and children younger than 2 years and provides
updated research findings to support it. This
statement addresses (1) the lack of evidence supporting educational or
developmental
benefits for media use by children younger than 2
years, (2) the potential adverse health and developmental effects of
media
use by children younger than 2 years, and (3)
adverse effects of parental media use (background media) on children
younger
than 2 years.
Zimmerman, F. J.,
Christakis, D. A., & Meltzoff, A. N. (2007). Associations between
media viewing and language development in children under age 2 years. The Journal of Pediatrics, 151(4), 364-368. Chonchaiya, W., & Pruksananonda, C. (2008). Television viewing associates with delayed language development. Acta Paediatrica, 97(7), 977-982. Anderson, D. R., & Pempek, T. A. (2005). Television and very young children. American Behavioral Scientist, 48(5), 505-522.
The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) has recommended that
children younger than 24 months of age not be exposed to television.
Nevertheless, television programs and home
videos are increasingly produced for very young children. This article
reviews
the extant research concerning television and
very young children with respect to the AAP recommendation. More very
young
children are currently watching television than
in the recent past; they pay substantial attention to TV programs and
videos
made for them. When learning from videos is
assessed in comparison to equivalent live presentations, there is
usually substantially
less learning from videos. Although one study
finds positive associations of language learning with exposure to some
children’s
TV programs, other studies find negative
associations of viewing with language, cognitive, and attentional
development. Background
TV is also a disruptive influence. Evidence thus
far indicates that the AAP recommendation is well taken, although
considerably
more research is needed.
Zimmerman, F. J.,
Gilkerson, J., Richards, J. A., Christakis, D. A., Xu, D., Gray, S.,
& Yapanel, U. (2009). Teaching by listening: the importance of
adult-child conversations to language development. Pediatrics, 124(1), 342-349. Television exposure is not independently associated with child language development when adult-child conversations are controlled. Adult-child conversations are robustly associated with healthy language development. Parents should be encouraged not merely to provide language input to their children through reading or storytelling, but also to engage their children in two-sided conversations. Tanimura, M., Okuma, K.,
& Kyoshima, K. (2007). Television viewing, reduced parental
utterance, and delayed speech development in infants and young children.
Archives of pediatrics & adolescent medicine, 161(6), 618-619.
Zimmerman and Christakis reported that early television exposure in children younger than 3 years was associated with deleterious effects on cognitive development, such as reading recognition at age 7 years. Their findings were based on a longitudinal study and supported the American Academy of Pediatrics' guidelines that parents should discourage television viewing for children younger than 2 years. Our previous survey on development and rearing of 18-month-old children (n = 1900) in 3 areas of Japan also suggested that children with frequent television viewing (>4 hours per day) would have delayed development of meaningful word speech, even with parental talking during television watching. Because of these findings, the Japan Pediatric Society proposed that children younger than 2 years of age should avoid frequent television viewing. To clarify the reason for the statistical association between delayed development in speaking and heavy television viewing, we conducted an observational study.
Christakis, D. A. (2009). The effects of infant media usage: what do we know and what should we learn?. Acta Paediatrica, 98(1), 8-16. The rise of infant TV viewing began in the late 1990s and has become an increasingly common occurrence. Today, over 90% of children begin watching TV regularly before the age of 2 years in spite of recommendations to the contrary. This article reviews what is known about the effects of infant TV viewing on multiple domains of child development including language, cognition and attentional capacity as well as directions for future research.
Conclusion: No studies to date have demonstrated benefits associated with early infant TV viewing. The preponderance of existing evidence suggests the potential for harm. Parents should exercise due caution in exposing infants to excessive media."It occured to me that reality TV scenarios are set up much in the same way as now-forbidden psychology experiments....far from focusing on ordinary human behavior, these shows are coming to resemble laboratory experiments (with poor controls) in which conditions are set up in a very particular way so that the most dramatic (read: painful or humiliating) results can emerge...It is immediately apparent that these shows aren't 'reality' programs at all, but precisely constructed exercises in humiliation." -Douglas Rushkoff, Experimental Programming, in Killed: Great Journalism Too Hot to Print, D. Wallis Ed., 2004, page 414.Andrejevic, M. (2002). The kinder, gentler gaze of Big Brother: Reality TV in the era of digital capitalism. New Media & Society, 4(2), 251-270. Surveillance-based reality television has emerged as a resurgent
programming genre in the US and Western Europe during a time
when the online economy is becoming increasingly
reliant upon surveillance as a form of economic exploitation. The
portrayal
of surveillance through ‘reality TV’ as a form of
entertainment and self-expression can thus be understood as playing an
important
role in training viewers and consumers for their
role in an ‘interactive’ economy. This article relies on interviews with
cast members and producers of MTV’s popular reality
show ‘Road Rules’, to explore the form of subjectivity that corresponds
to its implicit definition of ‘reality’. This form
of subjectivity reinforces the promise of the interactive economy to
democratize
production by relinquishing control to consumers
and viewers. Surveillance is portrayed not as a form of social control,
but
as the democratization of celebrity - a fact that
has disturbing implications for the democratic potential of the
internet’s
interactive capability.
WHAT IS IT about TV that has such a hold on us? In part, the attraction seems to spring from our biological “orienting response.” First described by Ivan Pavlov in 1927, the orienting response is our instinctive visual or auditory reaction to any sudden or novel stimulus. It is part of our evolutionary heritage, a built-in sensitivity to movement and potential predatory threats. Typical orienting reactions include dilation of the blood vessels to the brain, slowing of the heart, and constriction of blood vessels to major muscle groups. Alpha waves are blocked for a few seconds before returning to their baseline level, which is determined by the general level of mental arousal. The brain focuses its attention on gathering more information while the rest of the body quiets.
The orienting response may partly explain common viewer remarks such as: “If a television is on, I just can’t keep my eyes off it,” “I don’t want to watch as much as I do, but I can’t help it,” and “I feel hypnotized when I watch television.”
In the years since Reeves and Thorson published their pioneering work, researchers have delved deeper. Annie Lang’s research team at Indiana University has shown that heart rate decreases for four to six seconds after an orienting stimulus. In ads, action sequences and music videos, formal features frequently come at a rate of one per second, thus activating the orienting response continuously.
have observed slightly older infants who, when lying on their backs on the floor, crane their necks around 180 degrees to catchwhat light through yonder window breaks. This inclination suggests how deeply rooted the orienting response is.
Jerome L. and Dorothy Singer of Yale University, among others, have suggested that more viewing may contribute to a shorter attention span, diminished self-restraint and less patience with the normal delays of daily life. More than 25 years ago psychologist Tannis M. MacBeth Williams of the University of British Columbia studied a mountain community that had no television until cable finally arrived. Over time, both adults and children in the town became less creative in problem solving, less able to persevere at tasks, and less tolerant of unstructured time.Watching television, irrespective of the content, is increasingly associated with unfavourable biological and cognitive changes. These alterations occur at viewing levels far below the population norm. Given the population’s sheer exposure time to this environmental factor it is more than puzzling to consider how little awareness and action has resulted.
Perhaps because television is not a dangerous substance or a visibly risky activity, it has eluded the scrutiny that other health issues attract...Therefore it is hardly surprising that the incriminating research concerning screen media is coming from beyond the domains of media studies, education and psychology.
An editorial in the American Medical Association’s Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine now asks: “Why is it that something that is widely recognised as being so influential and potentially dangerous has resulted in so little effective action? To be sure, there has been some lack of political will to take on the enormously powerful and influential entertainment industry ... [Screen] media need to be recognised as a major public health issue” .
Autism is currently estimated to affect approximately one in every 166 children, yet the cause or causes of the condition are not well understood. One of the current theories concerning the condition is that among a set of children vulnerable to developing the condition because of their underlying genetics, the condition manifests itself when such a child is exposed to a (currently unknown) environmental trigger. In this paper we empirically investigate the hypothesis that early childhood television viewing serves as such a trigger. |
