Readingtv

Last
weekend there was an interesting article written by the
novelist, Norman Mailer.



Mr. Mailer makes an interesting case for parents to stop
using television as a baby sitter. This is something I’ve
advocated for a long time. The article goes on to say that
he (Mr. Mailer) believes the rise in the number of cases of
ADD in our youngsters today is partially due to their
constant interruption by television commercials. He states
that children who are involved in any type of activity and
then get constantly interrupted tend to become angry and
irritable.



I could not agree more.



On a daily basis I am amazed at the number of ways our
children amuse themselves. You hardly ever see a child just
playing outside of their houses without having some type of
electronic device strapped to their bodies. I wonder when
kids get any time alone to just think. It seems they must be
hooked up to a DVD, Walkman or radio of some sort. In
addition once you factor in the time they spend in front of
the boob tube, it doesn’t seem as if they have any time left
to think original thoughts for themselves, does it?



I don’t have enough time or space to address what effects
computer games and the Internet are probably having on our
kids.



Now, we can always go back to what we refer to as simpler
and gentler times. When I was growing up, we didn’t have
television twenty-four hours a day. It came on in the
afternoon, with two or three channels, and went off after
the ten o’clock news. We didn’t watch that much of it, since
there wasn’t that much to watch. Most of the kids I grew up
with played outside. We went barefooted from the first warm
days of spring until after Labor Day. We improvised. We
built forts, clubhouses and played ball until it got so dark
we couldn’t catch anything. Then we’d sit on someone’s porch
and talk about anything and everything. We built crystal
radios and tried to listen to far away stations all over the
world. We dated girls. We read books and we enjoyed the
simple things of just growing up.



Now, you might think this would be all well and good in some
rural country town, but we did all of this in one of the
country’s largest cities. We had opinions of our own, many
of which we carried over to this day. We couldn’t solve the
problems of the world, but we sure could come up with
solutions that made sense to us at the time.



At this time, in our house we have one television, with
probably 300 channels on it. I would guess that we watch the
thing a total of about one hour a week. The constant
interruption of the programming material by the commercials
is irritating to me and unless the program is something I am
really interested in watching, I just don’t bother.



When cable television first came out, most of us thought it
would be commercial free since we were paying for it every
month. Not so. There are probably only ten or so channels on
ours that do not have a commercial cutting in every ten or
twelve minutes. After a while you just get so frustrated,
you tune it out and look for other things to do.



I can see why children could get their minds messed up
having a constant interruption in their thought processes.
Mr. Mailer states that we are very low in educational
standards out of all of the industrialized countries of the
world. He suggests that this is mainly due to our students
have the ability to concentrate for any period of time
longer than ten or twelve minutes.



I find his conclusions to be fascinating and certainly do
point towards a correlation between commercial interruptions
and attention spans for our children. We are living in a
sound bite society in which nearly everything we do is
reduced to what can be related on television in a very short
period of time. Our children and yes, even ourselves are
bombarded on a minute-by-minute basis with commercialism at
every level. We cannot drive down the highway with seeing
signs for business, our radios are spotted with commercial
breaks, newspapers are sold based on advertising and yes,
the largest culprit of all is our television. We tend to use
it as a substitute for thought and logic by convincing
ourselves that we are being entertained.



Think about this, you used to be able to go to a movie and
basically sit in a dark place and escape the rigors of
reality for a few hours without any commercial interruption.
Have you been lately? If the start time is 2pm, then you get
twenty minutes of commercial material before the movie
begins. Is nothing sacred anymore?



While I believe we should be a well-informed society, I do
believe we all suffer from too a sense of information
overload. We read the paper and get the news, why rehash it
on the tube? Our kids need to read, our kids need to play,
and our kids need to think for themselves. This is the only
way they can stretch their minds and get prepared to survive
in the real world.



American Idol, Survivor, CSI and Law and Order are not the
real world. Kick those kids outside, stick a book in front
of their noses, sit down and talk to them. You’ll be
surprised at what they might tell you.