Television: Doesn't Content Matter?

The issue of content in television watching is all important on the one hand, and not really significant on the other. It depends on what question we're asking.

Particularly in reference to our small children I think there's another issue at least as important as content. My concerns about television for tots have a lot to do with the technical stuff of how television works, how the picture itself is transmitted (and I don't let my small-fry spend much time on the computer, either).

While staring at a television program or video, we *perceive* a continuously moving picture, like real life, but what's really happening is thousands of tiny little squares are rearranging themselves to create the picture we think we see. One part of our brain actually recognizes this, but getting frustrated with the speed of the changes and the way they are made, actually just sort of turns itself off. Unfortunately, this is also the part we use when we are thinking critically, mulling
something over before we accept it, and so we are left with the 'emotional' part of the thinking apparatus. I am *not* saying that we just blindly accept everything we see on television (although we all probably know somebody who does just this), but I am saying that we are more likely to be in a receptive mood to something portrayed on
television, and the subtler the message, the more likely it finds its way into our minds and becomes part of our basic assumptions.

Dan Adams says it better in The Child Influencers:

"...You think you are watching an image of Bill Cosby. ...Instead you are looking at the phosphorous glow of three hundred thousand dots which are being rapidly turned on and off...the dots are lit sequentially beginning in the upper right hand corner of your screen... (and they are) turned on or off as the scanning system moves down the screen, one row at a time. By the time the scan reaches Bill's chin, the dots making up his forehead are already fading.
...there is never an image of Bill Cosby on the screen. It only looks like an image of Bill Cosby because these scans take place so quickly--30 per second....TV images only take place after you have assembled them in your brain."

Now, to paraphrase the rest, we only detect *10* images a second (that is all we can consciously absorb), which is why the 30 images a second blend in to appear as continuous motion, even though what is *really* being transmitted is a strobe like blinking (30 blinks per second), and it's this rapidly changing imagery that we *don't* perceive that concerns me.

Researchers in Australia found that "humans habituate to repetitive light-stimuli" (which is what television actually is) and that the brain then "quits processing the information." Two other researchers independently found that TV produces changes in the brain waves- specifically an increase in alpha waves, which are "slow and typical of the person who is spaced out".

This study was particularly fascinating because it wasn't all what the researcher was expecting. A Dr. Erik Peper asked ten kids to watch their favorite children's television shows, assuming that since they were favorite programs, the kids would be involved in them, and so alpha and beta brain waves would alternate. They didn't.

Reading, on the other hand, produces large amounts of beta waves. So, as Dan Adams puts it, "We give up a measure of control over our thinking process due to the nature of the media itself."

Nobody really knows the affect it has on a child's brain to spend hours a day in the 'alpha' state, but we've been performing an experiment to find out for the last fifty years or so. I'm not impressed with the results, but maybe I'm wrong. Maybe it really doesn't make any difference at all. But how do we know? We're talking about our children's brains, so I think we might be a little more cautious about what we do to them. This research is a few years old, and maybe it's outdated now (I don't think so, but I don't know)- but that isn't really the point. The point is that we're messing around with our kids' brains and we don't really know what we're doing, whether it's harmful, has long-term results, or what.

So my children don't have television. Occasionally they watch movies or go to Granny Tea's to watch a program (but we've only lived near Granny Tea for the last year). In the meantime, what have they really missed? Why does this discussion make so many people uncomfortable? What is it about television that makes those who have it so very unhappy to hear from those who don't? If it's just a neutral form of entertainment, what makes people so evangelistic about it? And why is it considered 'extreme,' as I have often been told in the 14 years we've gone without it, to simply not bother with it? (I know I said a dozen yesterday, but I just realized that Pipsqueak is a year older than I was calculating and that she was one and not two when we completely disconnected our television set).



I'll have more to say about this and related issues later. As I told Blest with Sons, this information is largely coming from material I already wrote several years ago. But I don't want to overwhelm our readers any more than we already do, and blogging around here is going to be light for the next few days (light for us, anyway:D). That means you have a chance to catch up on previous posts, and maybe visit a few of the entries to the Homeschooling Carnival. Don't abandon us altogether!

The Shrine in The Corner
Blest With Sons; Most recent post at Blest (as of this writing).

I think our cultural dependency on the medium of the screen has resulted in an inability to reason, to think and reason well- we substitute emotion for careful thought- and Over at A Dollop of Sour Cream My Boaz's Ruth has been thinking about that very thing.