"Television Addiction"
[ Robert Kubey and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi / Scientific American / Feb. 2002 ]
"Survey participants commonly reflect that television has somehow absorbed or sucked out their energy, leaving them depleted. They say they have more difficulty concentrating after viewing than before. In contrast, they rarely indicate such difficulty after reading. After playing sports or engaging in hobbies, people report improvements in mood. After watching TV, people's moods are about the same or worse than before..."
"Is This How You Want To Spend 9 Of Your Years?"
[ Bob Greene / Chicago Tribune / 1.20.02, pg.2 ]
"I spoke with professor Kubey, and asked him why people should be expected to be concerned about something they take for granted and do not consider harmful. He said that the answer is as close as your pocket calculator.
'Let's say that the average human lifespan is roughly 75 years,' he said. 'And let's say, for the sake of this discussion, that a person sleeps eight hours a night. And let's say that the average person watches three hours of television a day. Do the math. In 75 years on Earth, a person will spend a third of that -- 25 years -- sleeping. Which gives the person 50 waking years. And if a person watches television for three hours a day. . . . "That comes out to about nine years,' Kubey said. 'And the question you have to ask yourself is: If I'm going to be awake for a total of 50 years during my lifetime, do I really want to spend nine of those years sitting in front of a TV set? And that's for the person who watches three hours a day. There are people who watch for six hours a day, off and on. They will have spent 18 of their 50 waking years watching TV.'"
I question profs. Kubey and Csikszentmihalyi's conclusion that people do not _generally_ experience mood enhancement after viewing tv.
There's a fair amount of research that indicates watching material that amuses results in an increase in mood, and thus, an increase in immunoenhancement. And "amusing" is a relative term.
Also, as the authors themselves note, television can serve as a vehicle for learning, and act to uplift the spirit. So 2-3 hours/day of tv could easily enhance the health and relative intelligence/coping skills of the viewer, actually _contributing_ to longevity.
Perhaps what you watch isn't as important as how you watch; if shows are viewed, at least to some extent, critically, then even "bad" or "junk" shows can act as springboards to discovery. A synergy of tv, the Internet and real time-disciplines (reading, hobbies, sports, etc.) is more powerful than any separate component, and may render the question of "television addiction", moot.
I believe the phrase Robert Kubey and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi are searching for is "get a life".
[ And I sincerely hope they turn their collective attention to the propaganda campaign being waged by CNN, MSNBC and FOX in the wake of the 9.11 tragedy. ]
[ To 75th (95th) Js: if you're serious, make offer next visit ]
Monday, January 7, 2002
"...if this war really is on terrorism and not just on Islamic extremism, our government should also be looking homeward."
A 15-year-old crashes a Cessna into a Bank of America building to show solidarity with Osama bin Laden. Anthrax pervades the US mail system.
Bigger dangers await. Signposts ahead...
The opening quote about "homegrown terrorism" was from a half-page (read: prominently placed) commentary by Salim Muwakkil in the Christmas Eve Chicago Tribune ("Should homegrown terrorism be targeted?" pg 15/sect. 1). Mr. Muwakkil feels that white extremist groups like the Aryan Nation and the Christian Identity movement pose as great a threat to national security as Islamic extremists. His implication is that aspects of the USA Patriot Act be used against such organizations.
Several more acts of "homegrown" terrorism followed by the inevitable media cries to "clamp down" on the threat of even more such events, and, unfortunately, Mr. Muwakkil and others of his mindset may get their wish.
[ Remember that the source of the anthrax distributed via the US mail system is thought to be domestic. ]
"...only the technology of the time of Hitler gave the possibility of fulfilling the Nazi dreams. Hitler invented nothing. His ideaology was so that people stopped thinking and followed orders." ---Simon Wiesenthal
Take note that the cable news outlets (CNN, MSNBC, FOX) have reduced national news reporting to a tiny scroll bar at the bottom of the screen. "The War Against Terror", complete w/ war tables and music themes has dominated the airwaves 24/7 since the 9.11 tragedy. Cable news speaks with one voice.
Simultaneously, the government has implemented technology which enables them to amass limitless information on individuals ("Magic Lantern" computer software, videocams in public areas combined with face recognition, GPS tied-in with cell phone use, etc.).
The danger, the real terror, here, would be to allow fear to compromise common sense, and permit the establishment of national identification cards containing chips capable of housing routine and enforcement information. Because the most secure place for such info isn't on the body, but _in_ the body.
I spoke to the (seemingly fantastic) issue of implanted id in my 11.11.2001 web entry.
What amazed me was William Safire's New York Times op/ed piece on 12.24.01 which reached the same conclusion ("Threat of National ID").
Of course, black market implantations would enable terrorists to carry on their activities. But who will act as the voice of reason as this grotesque scenario develops?
Politicians, news organizations, religious leaders, law enforcement, and, to a large extent, the American public, are already in lock-step with the logic and legislation framing "The War On Terror". Which resulted in the USA Patriot Act. Which is just waiting to be turned inward.
"I have found myself thinking often lately about the world of George Orwell's 1984, and not only because Orwell's "Big Brother" has become such a pervasive metaphor for expansive governmental surveillance.
The people in Orwell's totalitarian state, Oceania (Orwell's prescient amalgam of Britain and America?), knew that their state was engaged in a murky foreign war, against some enemy or other – either Eastasia or Eurasia. The war had become wallpaper, and there wasn't much point in trying to understand what the war was about, or evaluating the government's claims of victory. Information about the war was no more specific and no more reliable than the Newspeak about domestic affairs.
I don't know whether we have lost our balance, but I do know that power is careening in one direction. That, combined with the extent of what I don't know, is reason enough to worry."
--- Susan Herman, prof. of constitutional and criminal law, Brooklyn Law School
"USA Patriot Act and the USA Department of Justice: Losing Our Balances?
"Susan Herman's column, "Losing Our Balances?" is terrifying, not so much because it speaks of the outright corruption of power we are seeing in the Bush administration and friends, but moreso because of the lack of protest coming from the public. We truly have become the "numbed and dumbed" public that dictators and war-mongers love, haven't we? Truly chilling...
Rev. Marie D. Savino-Jones
California, USA
Saturday, December 15, 2001
"'Lovely to look at, dangerous to eat' is not a standard that's likely to help beef sales."
Cable news has been focusing exclusively for the past three months on the response to 9.11. The rest of September and October would have been understandable. But 24/7 exclusive "Response" coverage in November and December??...
...One could easily surmise that CNN, MSNBC and FOX were broadcast tools of the government.
While ads are begging people to return to "normal" via shopping and airplane flights, on-air investigative reporting has disappeared. You want news, you go local or on-line or forget about it.
One incredibly important problem area covered by the Chicago Tribune last week is food contamination in the nation's school lunch programs. The CDC has reported that school food outbreaks rose by 56% in the eight years from 1990-1997 (!).
[ There are an estimated 76 million cases of food-borne illness per year. ]
"Schools basically don't prepare anything anymore. It's all heat-and-serve. Everything comes frozen or canned."
Pathogens involved in school illness-outbreaks include: salmonella, norwalk-like virus, staph, clostridium, shigella, hepatitis A, strep, E.coli 0157:H7, campylobacter and bacillus cereus.
In terms of the general public, it's important to remember three things: (1) fast food restaurants are not required to list ingredients of their items (2) "meat" is defined as including muscle tissue, fat, skin, rind and gristle. MRM (mechanically removed meat -which can contain spinal cord tissue) is also regarded as meat (3) profit drives the fast-food industry.
Given factory farming methods, feces is no doubt present in most burgers consumed. A burger that can be constructed from the "meat" of over 200 different animals.
Rosa Parks refused to sit at the back of a bus on this day in 1955 and provided catalyst for change. She was simply tired of being mistreated.
Richard Roeper reported in his column of 11.29.01 (Chicago Sun-Times) that Whitney Houston and Michael Jackson used computer-generated imaging (CGI) to hide weight loss, excessive sweating, pale skin, sunken cheekbones, etc., on the 11.13.01 Jackson concert (CBS broadcast - originally shot in September).
"As as article in the Nov. 30 issue of Entertaiment Weekly puts it, 'Based on comparisons between footage shot at the September concerts and the final braodcast...Houston and Jackson appear to have been touched up to hide the displeasing sight of...'"
Roeper adds that "To remove the sweat, to darken the skin, to fill out someone's frame, is to lie about the physical appearances of these two superstars...Jackson and Houston look nothing like their former selves --- and it's wrong to use computer magic to shield us from that reality...".
It's important that the specialists who performed the CGI be uncovered; just how wide-spread is the practice of "CGI enhancement", and how far is it likely to spread in the future?
Richard Roeper reported in his column of 11.29.01 (Chicago Sun-Times) that Whitney Houston and Michael Jackson used computer-generated imaging (CGI) to hide weight loss, excessive sweating, pale skin, sunken cheekbones, etc., on the 11.13.01 Jackson concert (CBS broadcast - originally shot in September).