Something to read while you watch TV

All television is entertainment. That some of it occasionally conveys some information is secondary.

That's not a criticism of the medium. If anything it's critical of all other media forms that might be informational foremost. Who needs that as a primary reason for being?

~

In a delightfully meta moment on last night's episode of The New Adventures of Old Christine, Christine meets her psychiatrist boyfriend's brainy ex-wife at a party and in an attempt to contribute to the conversation she discusses the reality TV programs she watches. The ex-wife remarks how she doesn't know what Christine is talking about, as she doesn't own a TV. "How do you keep up with the Kardashians?" Christine asks.

The ex-wife then spouts a statistic about watching more than three hours of TV a day has been shown to inhibit brain development or attention span (or something--remember, entertainment, not information), and Christine inquires "What about people who watch six hours a day?"

Ostensibly the audience has been insulted, but it's the snobbish elitism of the ex-wife that comes off as the buffoon, given that this is all taking place on a TV show.

~

The flaw with studies is that there's no controlling all the variables; there's no taking an individual and making an identical copy (even twins, as similar as they are, don't qualify for our rhetorical purposes here) and then expose one to a set of circumstances and the other to a near-identical set of circumstances with one aspect changed, then watch what happens and draw definitive conclusions about the effect of that aspect. Researchers find people who watch more TV and find that many of them have diminished attention spans or something and conclude it was the TV that did them in, but there's no way of knowing what their attention spans would have been otherwise. It's feasible that they would have ended up as they did regardless; it might be that because they had a naturally short attention span that they were drawn to the format of TV. It's an equally valid conclusion, but the agenda for the research is to attempt to prove some causal link the other way.

It's not that TV might not have an effect; it's that there's no proving it does. If one has a dim opinion of TV one will believe the statistics prove it's bad, but that's nothing empirical.

It's been suggested that the way people are now on the computer or their mobile device while they watch TV indicates their attention spans have decreased to the point where even the nuggets of entertainment on the screen is not sufficient to hold them for the brief time it's on, but to be able to juggle more than one source like that seems to suggest they have enhanced attention spans.

~

To wax nostalgic over some good old days where people focused on a single thing is overlooking the reality of the past: It wasn't that people necessarily wanted to do one thing at a time; that's merely all they had available.

Never forget: The past sucked just as much as right now does.  The manifestation of that suckitude merely occurred in a way to which we're now accustomed, and such doesn't seem like it sucks any more.

Or at least that's the sort of conclusion a lifetime of TV watching allows me to draw.