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CNN is running this article.
Apparently TV is bad for children.
Who would have thought that watching TV shows with no mental content and just fast-paced, energetic visual noise might cause children to lose interest in things that are not fast paced, visually noisy!
It is a sorry sign that common sense can no longer play a role in our culture, and even the obvious needs a scientific study. It is pretty obvious that TV shows for young children where the content is nothing but bouncing colored blobs and high-energy singing would lead to attention problems later on--after all, children have to learm how to engage the world, so if they only see this kind of program, you have to expect what the result will be. I remember similar studies about Sesame Street reducing attention spans with its short sequence programming. Todays shows are an entension of that.
This seems like an important issue for work that involves duration and the mental fatigue of audience members: it suggests that our ability to watch may be very flexible, making the artist's ability to judge durating, etc. effects more difficult simply because of the "tolerance" created from simply making the work.
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