Word: video
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Catharsis School. Such shreds of research are useful, but they reveal little of the overall impact of TV on Video Boy's attitudes and behavior. The effect may be profound. Allan Leitman of Boston's Educational Development Center warns that TV is creating a generation of spectators. "Kids come into school today," he explains, "and they wait for people to tell them things. Without handling frogs or flying a kite, they lead less of a life. We're moving along in a mold that will produce people I can't even imagine." Many parents, shuddering...
Lucy & Fred. Sagan's views are in the minority, but on one point most educators agree: Video Boy is becoming a sort of peewee pundit. He knows, for example, the finer points of docking in outer space, can distinguish Bach from Bartok, and is a storehouse of such miscellany as the fact that whales' backs get sunburned and peel. When he enters school, his vocabulary will be at least one year ahead of the pre-TV child. On the nursery-type show Romper Room, a teacher once asked her toddlers if anyone could think of a word beginning...
...serve as a kind of head-start program, exposing new worlds that a deprived child would otherwise never see. The drawback, of course, is that much of TV programming has little to do with the real world. Adults are often depicted as bickering, tension-ridden morons. If, for instance, Video Boy had Lucy for a mother and Fred Flintstone for a father, who could blame him if he ran off to join the flower children...
...saved for the kiddies. They are fed one commercial every four minutes, or twice the adult rate. Says Adman Frederick Bruns: "The priceless thing is repetition. You've got to get to a kid three to five times a week to get him to act on a message." Video Boy acts by nagging his parents to get him a "Blasto-tank-with-twin-rocket -launchers -by -Slambang -Toys." Once he gets it, though, he is invariably disappointed because the toy is always much smaller and much less exciting than it looked on the overdramatized commercial. Thus Video Boy learns...
...blame? Not Video Boy. Like any child, he looks at TV not because it is so compelling, but because it is there. Offer him something better and he will watch it just as avidly. That responsibility falls partly to the networks, but mostly to the parents. Child psychiatrists agree that parents should-indeed must-exercise some control over TV viewing time and program selection. Otherwise, Video Boy may retreat to the box, and any time spent beyond 25 hours of weekly viewing is regarded as a sign of emotional disturbance...