NEWS: Kill Your Television (It's Official This Time)

GEEK: Kill Your Television (It's Official This Time)

When applied in a sufficiently awesome and innovative way, science is one of my favorite things. Not entirely unlike raindrops on roses or LOLzes on kittens.(1) Thusly, perhaps you can appreciate as I did all of the important, painstaking, and dedicated work and effort behind a study done at the University of Otago, the results of which were released in Pediatrics magazine this past Tuesday. In this groundbreaking research, scientists at the university definitively linked, for the first time ever, excessive childhood television viewing with later results that are truly shocking: increased attention problems later in adolescence.

No. Way. At first I thought Otago's press release might really be a cleverly-disguised Shop-Vac set on reverse, because that's how much my mind was utterly blown.

Seriously though, my initial reaction was one of "What, did they just now get television in New Zealand?" but the whole reason that this study has hit the presses to begin with is that it's the "first in the world to investigate a possible long-term link between television viewing in childhood and attention problems in adolescence." That fact alone, in and of itself, is probably the most surprising part of the whole shebang. Sure, the exciting world of cathode-ray entertainment was only brought to the masses a little under three-quarters of a century ago, which I guess is not a lot of time for studies in the grand scientific scheme of things, but let's take a look at some other things that found wild popularity during the 1940s:

• McDonalds
• Spam
• Kraft American Cheese
• The Holocaust
• Perry Como

It would probably be easier to just plaster a warning label on the entirety of the World War II era as hazardous to our collective mental and physical health and be done with it. There's no scientific method in that, however, and therefore there must be studies. To be perfectly fair, this one started in the 1970s (when television was still shiny and new and full of mystery), meaning that when I said "painstaking and dedicated," I meant it.

As for the "important" part, I suppose that the real question now isn't so much what sort of damage does television do, but why: is it the constant sensory overload of lit-up pixels, like staring into millions of little light bulbs? Or is lack thereof, the unshakable sense of boredom that comes from interacting with no one and transfixed by nothing in particular, clicking through channels at a mile a minute in an incessant search for something ever more entertaining? At any rate, I should probably call my mother to let her know about this study. It ought to be nice to have the official backing of science after shouting the same theory since time immemorial.


(1): _DictionaryGirl_ just spent three hours watching The Sound of Music on television, and it seems to have made her a little bit daft.

My television died like ten years ago.

Sometimes, on holidays or when I'm feeling sad, I go and leave flowers on it's grave.

One episode of Nancy Grace killed my TV. Don't let it happen to yours !!! Save your TV from evil !

So, wait, I'm confused. Are we supposed to take television away from our children, or are we supposed to be angry at the people who want to take television away from our children?

Hey, I watched a shit-ton of television when I was a kid in the 70's, and it hasn't shortened my attention...

...hey, that paperclip sure is shiny...

...wait, what was I saying?

It's ultimately important to actually prove "what everybody knows." If it's never proven, then what everybody knows may be wrong.

The Reagan Administration tried to prove that pornography was harmful. Everybody knew it was true, but as it turned out, the results didn't agree.

Otago?

My bet is on the fact that you can't interact with television. With TV you just sit back, switch your brain into neutral, and absorb whatever information (or lack there off) is being broadcast at you. When you get away from the "tube" and interact with real people you need to actually use your brain to understand what they are saying and formulate a reaction. While five to 11 year olds won't be holding many scientific discussions, the conversations they do have are basically "brain training" for their later lives.

I think we're supposed to be responsible parents by staying informed about what our kids are watching (hopefully in a non-douchebag-moral-majority way) and not letting them watch ten hours of it a day.

As it relates to that, I should think that any of those "green light" shows are about ten times more mind-numbing than anything else. I wouldn't let my kid-relatives touch them with a ten foot pole. Singing Bee. Feh.

but, Transformers and G.I. Joe are cool!

I...didn't watch alot of TV growing up. Most of the shows my peers remember from childhood, I never watched. At all.

I don't really watch that much now. I'd rather be drawing, writing, or...get this....just thinking.

AND my kids sure as hell don't watch alot of TV. Especially witih the crap that's on there now.

I've never watched television and I do not know much about children, but decades of evaluating political relevant information from all over Europe have teached me that a correlation between to phenomena A and B does not necessarily mean that A is the cause for B. Maybe B is the cause of A, or A and B have a common cause C. or maybe A and B are part of a complex mecanism involving C, D, E, F and G to Y.

If Aspartame consumers frequently suffer from diabetes, does this mean that Aspartame causes diabetes? Does the cultivation of tulips lead to Protestantism? Does ketchup lead to strange ideas like democracy? Does eating brioche make rich? Be careful with deducting causal dependencies from what your mathematicians call statistical correlations.

Did you consider the possibility that children are more apt to watch television when they have problems paying attention to, say, a book or a fairytale told by their grandma? Or the possibility that children who have problems in school or family have a) attention problems and b) tend to "flee" to the artificial world of television? Or the possibility that both phenomena, attention problems and excessive television watching, may be caused by other factors like social status, intelligence, region, religion, education or whatever?

I don't say that television does NOT cause attention problems. All I'm saying is that you should be careful with deductions from census numbers (or what you people call "statistical data").

Not all gold comes from the West Indies, people.

I hope your not saying Cheese and macaroni is bad for you too, you know I love the little hot dogs cut up in it.

I use my TV as an alarm clock it's the perfect mix of annoying and the light variations really make it hard to go to sleep.

Question: how are millions of parents and caretakers going to keep there child entertained ?
I hope you don't mean actual human interaction or learning about THE REAL WORLD AROUND THEM !!!

Thank you for expressing so eloquently and intelligently precisely what I was thinking in a jumbled and awkward fashion.

Louis_XIV, marry me?

the only channel i get is nbc. television is already dead to me.

This must completely explain why I have a severe lack of being able to...

Wait...

What were we talking about again? Eh, I don't remember. I'm gonna go watch TV.

weeeelllllll,.,.,.. no. sorry. no woman no compromise. they cant control it, you cant control it. no one can. THATS THE WHOLE POINT!. you will buy the stupid soap, and you will waste (a big chunk of) your life away.
no. just get rid of the tube. you dont need it. they dont need it. you will still have fun in your life and lord knows they will.

if i did it, so can you.

ps. louis 14, yes science can missinterpretted. but i dont need rocket science to tell me that tv was not a positive thing in my life. or that it is not a positive thing in general.

but I ♥ my television.

So what about computers/internet?

Riley, I think your best hope is to become a concubine: show allegiance here...

I would make two points: DG's thesis is relevant here. The fact is, we have little data actually examining the relationship of TV watching to anything else, which is criminal. We are only now learning about how much the brain can be affected by its environment during development, and it is clear that development takes an annoyingly long time. This is a start.

Second, the Sun King's point is a good one. Correlation =/= causation and all that. However, at some point logical connections between two factors can be made. How old were the participants when TV watching seems to have the strongest effect? At older ages, TV watching may be mostly or entirely voluntary, and Louis's point could be valid - perhaps TV is not causing attention loss, but is correlated with other factors that are the cause of attention loss. BUT, if the effect occurs when children cannot self-dose on TV (i.e parents control when and how much), then it may be more likely that TV is a cause.

TLDNR