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TV Viewing Linked to Attention Problems
oDDmON oUT writes "While your mother may have told you that sitting too close to the TV was bad for your eyes, the folks over at New Scientist are reporting that too much television may be linked to a bad attention span 'The study is not proof that TV viewing causes attention problems, Landhuis notes, because it may be that children prone to attention problems may be drawn to watching television. "However, our results show that the net effect of television seems to be adverse."'"
Yep. It's nowhere near new. I used data like this in a speech I had to do in public speaking around 1979 in high school. When I worked in Special Ed, many teachers had noticed that the kids who talked more about TV were the ones that tended to have less of an attention span. There's a lot of experience that leads one to believe that kids that watch too much TV tend to have an attention span that's about 10-15 minutes, or the length of time between commercials.
On the other hand, I've seen a huge number of kids who are supposedly ADD or ADHD show an amazing attention span when they sit down with a copy of Harry Potter. It makes me wonder if part of the problem with attention spans in school is due to inappropriate expectations for a child's age and boring teachers that just don't have the skills teachers did in years past.
The reason it is more common now than it used to be is two fold: one, our society has improved mechanisms for detecting neurologically atypical activity due to improved social programs and medical technologies; and two, there actually _are_ more people in the world with these disorders than before. The reason for the latter is connected with how medical technology has advanced over the past century or so. Before, people with either mental or physical disabilities would not usually be able to be successful, and thus would not typically survive in a competitive world. These people would have relatively few offspring, and the genes associated with those disabilities would not be very common. Enter ever-more improved medicines, the ability to control or limit the effects of the disabilities, allowing people with the genes associated with them to reproduce as commonly as people with typical human gene structures. The result is that the gene pool contains an increasing amount of "flawed" genetic material, increasing the likelihood that a child would be born with some disorder or another.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
When I was a kid I watched a TON of television and I have an incredibly long attention span. I can sit and write code for hours. Or work on music for hours (piano, guitar, synths, audio workstation). I can have a long conversation on a particular subject (over dinner, in the car, etc...). My average viewing day at age three during the week was:
7:00AM-11:00AM (Cartoons, Little Rascals, Brady Bunch)
3:00-5:00PM (Rin-Tin-Tin, more Little Rascals, The Three Stooges, Laurel and Hardy, Looney Toons, etc...)
7:00PM-9:00PM (Anything my folks watched which could have been Star Trek, Hogan's Heroes, any number of 70s cop shows and of course the news occasionally in the 6:00-7:00PM time slot.
Weekends were usually:
7:00AM- 12:00PM (Cartoons)
1:00PM-5:00PM (Local hosted movies "Superhost" in Cleveland)
6:00PM-7:00PM (Star Trek)
8:00PM-11:00PM (Any number of "family shows" in the 70s, Love Boat and Fantasy Island on Saturday nights, and maybe a movie on Sunday nights)
It had no impact on my attention span.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
...is a learned skill as well. Everyone that's worked in a cubicle or "open landscape", learn how to tune out most (if not all of it). Find a farmer or lumberjack and place him there and he'll go crazy with all the chattering until he learns. If you got zero attention span, the TV is also the easy way out, it's a constant series of impressions to keep you sitting there. You don't have to actually learn to sit down and get some attention span.
Then again, I rarely get to do that at work either. If I had a single checklist of things to do, and could work my way down then all would be well. Instead it's definately got multitasking, I'd say at times multithreading, preemption and there's always someone trying to hog the scheduler. I make it sound all bad but I don't really feel it that way - but it's definately not for the really long attention spans.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I'm with you, though I go for the convenience of netflix. I quite watching broadcast/cable TV in 1993. On the once every other year chance I watch a show at a friend's place, I'm constantly annoyed at the breaks in the story. Aside from years of training, I don't see how people can tolerate it.
What I prefer is to have a whole season on DVD -- the story becomes a video-novel that way. Even feature films start to feel like short stories when compared to the pleasure of a commercial free movie about 20+ hours long per season.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good