4 ms·

I am surprised that 3.5 hours a day is the threshold where decreased performance begins, as in my little life bubble that seems like an abnormally large amount

I am surprised that 3.5 hours a day is the threshold where decreased performance begins, as in my little life bubble that seems like an abnormally large amount of TV watching. However Wikipedia[1] tells me the average USA "consumer" is watching 4 hours a day! Yikes. To a layman like me this seems like great research. A lot of effort was put in to draw a rigorous conclusion about the effects of TV watching on some aspect of mental performance. I just read Amusing Ourselves to Death though, and I find myself compelled to be a lot more dramatic about the negatives of TV watching, on the late author's behalf. Yes it's pretty bad that (excessive) TV watching literally damages your cognitive ability to some degree, but I would say (and please point me to research) that before that damage starts to show it's already near devastated your personal 'knowledge-base'. To try and paraphrase Postman, the content on TV is either trivial or non-trivial but delivered in such a way as to keep you from holding onto any significance, meaning, or theory. TV as a medium is terribly fractured (commercial breaks, 'Now..This' segues) and fundamentally visual (rather than typographic). Human minds thrive in connectivity, interrelation, and continuity. Our minds thrive in the typographic world. At his most polemic, Postman argues that TV at is worst is totally incoherent, conferring basically no knowledge whatsoever. A person's mind might still performance just fine in tests, but having been starved of knowledge it is practically unintelligent. Think also of the opportunity cost. At an average of 4 hours a day, as USA 'consumer' watches 1460 hours of TV a year. An average person reads 200-250 words per minute. Taking the upper bound, and the average non-fiction book as 50,000 words. They could finish that average non-fiction book in 4.16 hours. So, they could be reading almost 1 book a day for a whole year instead. Now, that napkin-math result seems implausible to me, but imagine if I was off by an order of magnitude. Say this person could read 35 non-fiction books in a year if that wholesale swapped TV for reading non-fiction. 35 non-fiction books at ~42 hours per book. They would be enormously enriched by this alternative behaviour. As an extreme (but unfortunately not uncommon) example, instead of getting all red in the face hearing about Socialism coming to the USA from Fox news, our dear average USA 'consumer' could have read Das Kapital, and The Soul of Man Under Socialism, and The Road to Wigan Pier, and Capitalism and Freedom, and On Liberty, and... etc etc. You get the point. So yeah, I'm really onboard with the thesis of Amusing Ourselves To Death. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_consumption https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_consumption

onion2k 7y ago
They would be enormously enriched by this alternative behaviour. Why are you assuming that watching television isn't enriching? What makes books better?
- thundergolfer 7y ago
  I say a bit about why books are better in the paragraph preceding the one containing what you’ve quoted. I can make a positive case for reading over TV watching, and the book I mention in the comment does just that, but first I’d like to quibble with your first question. I don’t say that watching TV is not enriching in general. Certain television and certain movies are awesome and even indispensable. I do think books are better than watching TV though. For starters, you are in a thread about how TV is associated with cognitive decline. Reading on the other hand is promoted by the results of a number of studies showing its relationship to improved cognitive performance. Perhaps the simplest argument I can think of now is this. When we as a society look to create great educators, lawyers, doctors, scientists, and philosophers, we make sure they’re reading a lot. We don’t have them watch TV. When society builds education systems they fill their curriculums with books, whether at the primary, secondary, or tertiary levels. This is still true despite television existing for almost 100 years. The replacement of reading by television has been actively resisted by educational leaders generally. In the most potent cases, professors would find it totally laughable that their graduate curriculums be facilitated by TV watching rather than books.
  - pbhjpbhj 7y ago
    >Perhaps the simplest argument I can think of now is this. When we as a society look to create great educators, lawyers, doctors, scientists, and philosophers, we make sure they’re reading a lot. We don’t have them watch TV. // Not the GP. You're right that argument is simple, it's also not compelling. The reason for that is most of the information is currently encoded in the form of literature. It might be that we'll made TV/computer programmes can convey the information, and build knowledge, better; we've just not tested that yet. Is an anatomy book better (alone) for learning than text and visuals that are interactive - maybe VR - for example. If you take the people who read and make them watch TV it seems likely to me that they'll watch stimulating television, if they read stimulating books? In short maybe it's the content, and one content group prefers one medium. I'd totally agree that TV with advertising breaks is anathema -- but Netflix documentaries (say), seems like they might be better than a Mills & Boon bonkbuster? If it is solely the medium the problem is significant and we need quickly to find out what specifically about the medium is the issue. It's unlikely to get solved though, TV advertising is a cornerstone of Capitalist society; keeping the masses "sedated" by TV (raging about Soaps or MCU plotlines instead of real life) helps to control society. MOOCs are huge and often don't use books as primary media, they rely on lectures delivered through video. My most recent learning has all been this way and I find it works well for me. But presumably you include "screen based text" with "books"?

onion2k 7y ago

They would be enormously enriched by this alternative behaviour. Why are you assuming that watching television isn't enriching? What makes books better?

thundergolfer 7y ago
I say a bit about why books are better in the paragraph preceding the one containing what you’ve quoted. I can make a positive case for reading over TV watching, and the book I mention in the comment does just that, but first I’d like to quibble with your first question. I don’t say that watching TV is not enriching in general. Certain television and certain movies are awesome and even indispensable. I do think books are better than watching TV though. For starters, you are in a thread about how TV is associated with cognitive decline. Reading on the other hand is promoted by the results of a number of studies showing its relationship to improved cognitive performance. Perhaps the simplest argument I can think of now is this. When we as a society look to create great educators, lawyers, doctors, scientists, and philosophers, we make sure they’re reading a lot. We don’t have them watch TV. When society builds education systems they fill their curriculums with books, whether at the primary, secondary, or tertiary levels. This is still true despite television existing for almost 100 years. The replacement of reading by television has been actively resisted by educational leaders generally. In the most potent cases, professors would find it totally laughable that their graduate curriculums be facilitated by TV watching rather than books.
- pbhjpbhj 7y ago
  >Perhaps the simplest argument I can think of now is this. When we as a society look to create great educators, lawyers, doctors, scientists, and philosophers, we make sure they’re reading a lot. We don’t have them watch TV. // Not the GP. You're right that argument is simple, it's also not compelling. The reason for that is most of the information is currently encoded in the form of literature. It might be that we'll made TV/computer programmes can convey the information, and build knowledge, better; we've just not tested that yet. Is an anatomy book better (alone) for learning than text and visuals that are interactive - maybe VR - for example. If you take the people who read and make them watch TV it seems likely to me that they'll watch stimulating television, if they read stimulating books? In short maybe it's the content, and one content group prefers one medium. I'd totally agree that TV with advertising breaks is anathema -- but Netflix documentaries (say), seems like they might be better than a Mills & Boon bonkbuster? If it is solely the medium the problem is significant and we need quickly to find out what specifically about the medium is the issue. It's unlikely to get solved though, TV advertising is a cornerstone of Capitalist society; keeping the masses "sedated" by TV (raging about Soaps or MCU plotlines instead of real life) helps to control society. MOOCs are huge and often don't use books as primary media, they rely on lectures delivered through video. My most recent learning has all been this way and I find it works well for me. But presumably you include "screen based text" with "books"?