TVs Disastrous impact on Children
by Nell Postman, Professor of Communication
Watching television over a long span seriously damages children's ability to think clearly. Exposure to TV sensationalism robs youngsters of childhood. Television is turning out to be a disastrous influence at least as far as we can determine at present. Television appears to be shortening the attention span of the young as well as eroding, to a considerable extent, their linguistic powers and their ability to handle mathematical symbolism.
It also causes them to be increasingly impatient with deferred gratification. Even more serious is that television is opening up all society's secrets and taboos, thus erasing the dividing line between childhood and adulthood and leaving a very homogenized culture in the wake.
I call television the first curriculum because of the amount of attention our children give to it. By now, the basic facts are known by almost everyone: between the ages of 6 and 18, the average child spends roughly 15,000 to 16,000 hours in front of a television set, whereas school probably consumes no more than 13,000 hours.
Moreover, it is becoming obvious that there really is no such thing as children's programming. Between midnight and 2 in the morning, there are something like 750,000 children throughout America watching television every day. There is a fantasy people have that after 10 p.m. children are not watching television, that's nonsense.
Many parents as well as educators, also have the mistaken belief that television is an entertainment medium in which little of enduring value is either taught by or learned from it. Television has a transforming power at least equal to that of the printing press and possibly as great as that of the alphabet itself.
Television is essentially a visual medium. It shows pictures moving rapidly and in a very dynamic order. The average length of a shot on a network-TV show is about 3 seconds, and on the commercial about 2,5 seconds. Although human speech is heard on television it is the picture that always contains the most important meanings-Television can never teach what a medium like a book can teach, and yet educators are always trying to pretend that they can use television to promote the cognitive habits and the intellectual discipline that print promotes. In this respect they will always be doomed to failure. Television is not a suitable medium for conveying ideas, because an idea is essentially language - words and sentences.
The code through which television communicates the visual image - is accessible to everyone. Understanding printed words must be learned, watching pictures does not require any learning. As a result, TV is a medium that becomes intelligible to children beginning at about the age of 36 months. From this very early age on, television continuously exerts influence.
For this reason, I think it's fair to say that TV, as a curriculum, molds the intelligence and character of youth far more than formal schooling. Beyond that, evidence is accumulating that TV watching hurts academic performance. A recent survey indicated that the more children sit in front of the television, the worse they do on achievement-test scores.
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Television doesn't allow a person to accumulate knowledge based on past experiences. Language itself tends to be sequential and hierarchical and it allows complex ideas to be built up in writing through a logical progression. Most of all, language tends to be more abstract, it encourages the use of imagination.
It is not true, as many insist, that watching TV is a passive experience. Anyone who has observed children watching television will know how foolish that statement is. In watching TV, children have their emotions fully engaged. It is their capacity for abstraction that is quiescent.
I'm not criticizing television for that. I'm saying that's what television does; that is the nature of the medium; that's why the word vision is in the word television. And there are some wonderful uses of that feature. Television, after all, does have a valuable capacity to involve people emotionally in its pictures. Certainly, there are instances when television presents drama in its fullest and richest and the most complex expression.
Questions for discussion
1. Is television a good or bad influence on the way children learn?
2. Is television more pervasive in a child's world than school?
3. Why is it called the first curriculum?
4. How does TV hurt a child's linguistic ability?
5. Television molds intelligence and character of youth, doesn't it?
6. Is watching TV a passive or active experience?
7. What positive influence can TV exert on children?
9. Read and translate the text without a dictionary. Think if there is any association between a gender and deviant behavior.
Gender and Deviance
In the United States, women who cry in public in response to emotional situations are not generally considered devianteven women who cry frequently and easily. This view of women has remained relatively constant. Over the past fifty years, however, societys perception of men who cry has changed. A man who cried publicly in the 1950s would have been considered deviant. Today, men who cry in response to extreme emotional situations are acting within societys norms. Male politicians cry when announcing defeat, male athletes cry after winning a championship, and male actors cry after winning an award. By todays standards, none of these men is committing a deviant act.
Relativism and Deviance
Deviance is a relative issue, and standards for deviance change based on a number of factors, including the following:
Location: A person speaking loudly during a church service would probably be considered deviant, whereas a person speaking loudly at a party would not. Society generally regards taking the life of another person to be a deviant act, but during wartime, killing another person is not considered deviant.
Age: A five-year-old can cry in a supermarket without being considered deviant, but an older child or an adult cannot.
Social status: A famous actor can skip to the front of a long line of people waiting to get into a popular club, but a nonfamous person would be considered deviant for trying to do the same.
Individual societies: In the United States, customers in department stores do not try to negotiate prices or barter for goods. In some other countries, people understand that one should haggle over the price of an item; not to do so is considered deviant.
