Does TV Help Make Americans Passive and Accepting of Authority?

[xchrom]

http://www.alternet.org/culture/does-tv-help-make-americans-passive-and-accepting-authority



Historically, television viewing has been used by various authorities to quiet potentially disruptive people—from kids, to psychiatric inpatients, to prison inmates. In 1992, Newsweek (“ Hooking Up at the Big House ”) reported, “Faced with severe overcrowding and limited budgets for rehabilitation and counseling, more and more prison officials are using TV to keep inmates quiet.” Joe Corpier, a convicted murderer, was quoted, “If there’s a good movie, it’s usually pretty quiet through the whole institution.” Both public and private-enterprise prisons have recognized that providing inmates with cable television can be a more economical method to keep them quiet and subdued than it would be to hire more guards.
Just as I have not emptied my refrigerator of beer, I have not gotten rid of my television, but I recognize the effects of beer and TV. During some dismal periods of my life, TV has been my “drug of choice,” and I’ve watched thousands of hours of TV sports and escapist crap. When I don’t need to take the edge off, I have watched Bill Moyers, Frontline, and other “good television.” But I don’t kid myself—the research show that the more TV of any kind we watch, the more passive most of us become.

American TV Viewing
Sociologist Robert Putnam in Bowling Alone (2000) reported that in 1950, about 10 percent of American homes had television sets, but this had grown to more than 99 percent. Putnam also reported that the number of TVs in the average U.S. household had grown to 2.24 sets, with 66 percent of households having three or more sets; the TV set is turned on in the average U.S. home for seven hours a day; two-thirds of Americans regularly watch TV during dinner; and about 40 percent of Americans’ leisure time is spent on television. And Putnam also reported that spouses spend three to four times more time watching television together than they do talking to each other.

[Egalitarian Thug]

1. K&R Way more than smoking pot does. n/t

[woo me with science]

2. Noam Chomsky on this:

"...The other one is not discussed so much, but I think it’s pretty important. This is an extremely atomized society. People are alone. It’s a very business-run society. The very explicit goal of the business world is to create a social order in which the basic social unit is you and your television set, in which you’re watching ads and going out to purchase commodities. There are tremendous efforts made, that have been going on for a century and a half, to try to induce this kind of consciousness and social order."

Noam gets it.

(See entire post by limpyhobbler in Good Reads: http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1016&pid=19730)

[OffWithTheirHeads]

3. Why do you think they call it programming?

[MindPilot]

4. I think it is the other way around.

Because Americans are already such a punitive authority-worshiping bunch, the programming is geared to that. That is why basically everything on the tube portrays law enforcement--from COPS to Homeland--as our Saviors.

Television programmers have no nefarious goal to brainwash the American citizenry; they simply want to collect as many advertising dollars as they can.

[mike_c]

5. the plug-in drug....

That's one of the reasons I turned my television off over two decades ago. And being an ex-TV watcher is very much like being another kind of ex-addict-- later, when you're totally clean, it grosses you out to even think of returning to the addiction. Whenever I see little bits of television programming, when in hotels for example, I am struck every time by how banal and ridiculous most of it is, and by most American's seeming obliviousness to its banality. I'd sooner chew my right arm off than willingly sit in front of a television for hours at a time.

[datasuspect]

6. yes

[AsahinaKimi]

7. I am so happy

Not to own one of those things... (TV)

[navarth]

8. TV, Religion, Medicine, Sharp Objects

best kept out of the hands of stupid people

[TalkingDog]

9. Between TV and Flouride it's a wonder we're not drooling idiots... oh wait.

No, I'm not tin foil hatting your thread...



24 studies have now reported an association between fluoride exposure and reduced IQ in children
Find one example in the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (online December 17, 2010).

Three studies have reported an association between fluoride exposure and impaired neurobehavioral development

Three studies have reported damage to the brain of aborted fetuses in high fluoride areas

Over 100 laboratory studies have reported damage to the brain and/or cognitive function among fluoride-exposed animals.

[HopeHoops]

10. Hard call. It at least makes them morons.

As Marshall McLuhan said,

"The list of objections could be and has been lengthened indefinitely: confusing technology itself with its use of the media makes of the media an abstract, undifferentiated force and produces its image in an imaginary “public” for mass consumption; the magical naivete of supposed causalities turns the media into a catch-all and contagious “mana”; apocalyptic millenarianism invents the figure of a homo mass-mediaticus without ties to historical and social context, and so on."

He's also credited with the line "The media is the opiate of the masses", an abbreviated version of the above quote.

And both quotes were circa 1956.

We have a TV for videos (DVD, VHS, and LaserDisc), but I shut off broadcast/cable in 1982. I have no use for it.

[LovePeacock]

11. The USA has the greatest propaganda system the world has ever seen. And it's called the media.