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To speak of reality becoming a spectacle is a breathtaking provincialism. It universalizes the viewing habits of a small, educated population living in the rich part of the world, where news has been converted into entertainment…It assumes that everyone is a spectator. It suggests, perversely, unseriously, that there is no real suffering in the world. But it is absurd to identify the world with those zones in the well-off countries where people have the dubious privilege of being spectators, or of declining to be spectators, of other people’s pain…consumers of news, who know nothing at first hand about war and massive injustice and terror. There are hundreds of millions of television watchers who are far from inured to what they see on television. They do not have the luxury of patronizing reality.
-- Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others
During the 1993 Branch Davidian standoff in Waco, Daniel R. Anderson, a University of Masschusetts-Amherst psychology professor, began to wonder about the effects of around-the-clock news coverage on children. His own toddler seemed oblivious to the “electronic wallpaper” on his TV, but he wondered if it was having a more insidious impact.
So he began studying 48 toddlers, age one to three, watching them play in a quiet setting and with the television tuned to the game show “Jeopardy,” which the children largely ignored. The results won’t be presented until next month, but Dr. Anderson said he found a definite impact. One finding: The time children will play with a single toy or engage in an activity is cut in half when the television is on in the background.
“It’s a time of life when kids are really organizing their ability to think forward in time,” says Dr. Anderson. “If the television is going on in the background with competing language, it’s quite possible that it disrupts what may be a very important developmental process.”
-- “News You Can Lose: The Health Risks of Watching the War,”
Wall Street Journal
The average child in the United States sees six thousand hours of television by their fifth year….Television floods the infant-child brain with images at the very time his or her brain is supposed to learn to make images from within….Failing to develop imagery means having no imagination.
-- Joseph Chilton Pearce
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