The Weird and The Wacky Meet |
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Where YouBetIAm comes to write…. |
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MCR 5: Television |
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Parents have new reasons to switch off the television Jill Smith Thursday, April 21, 2005 The Oregonian
In a very enlightening article that was meant to showcase National Turnoff TV Week, reporter Jill Smith talked to a variety of people, including psychiatrists, parents, programmers, and cited various studies. All of which say the same thing. Too much television for children is bad. National TV Week is a week where parents are supposed to turn off their televisions and encourage their children to go out and do something besides sit in front of the boob tube. In the 1960’s Newton Minnow said that television is a “vast wasteland,” and while he meant it as a challenge to television producers to improve the quality of what he produced, I think the concept still applies today. National TV Week is a challenge to parents to take control of their children’s viewing habits in much the same way. Whether they just take away the power cord, or invest the time and money into an electronic monitoring device, the result is the same. It forces children to use what little TV time they have to watch quality programming, which in itself is a benefit to TV as a whole, in that it forces TV to clean up its act. While I do not believe that parents should have any say over what goes on the airwaves, I believe that they do have a responsibility to monitor how much TV and what their children watch. I myself invested in a TiVo. While I do not have kids, I familiarized myself with the filtering software that is built in just to see what it could do. What surprised me about my TiVo is that I watched less, not more, television once I bought it. When I watch, I don’t surf, and I don’t waste time just vegging out in front of the TV. In short, my viewing has become more meaningful. As a media consumer, I recognize the value of television, but I also recognize the value of turning it off.
Copyright 2005 |
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by Amanda Evans |
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Date: 04/26/05 |
