Word: videos
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...progressive Lamplighter School in Dallas, the students are hard at work at their computer consoles, their faces intent in the reflected greenish light of the video screens. An eight-year-old types instructions that bring forth on the screen a figure of the space shuttle Columbia, complete with desert landing strip and disposable booster rockets. A nine-year-old pointedly picks apart the logic of one of his teacher's programs. Three-year-olds who cannot yet speak in complete sentences bang away at their keyboards, conjuring up electronic squiggles and squares...
...Marshall McLuhan might cite it as proof that the medium is indeed the message. But to Professor Feshbach as well as to Joan Anderson Wilkins, a researcher on family issues, it was not a symbol but an illustration of something more portentous: television addiction. Those nursery-school students are video junkies...
...they watch more than ten hours a week? Is their concentration span divided into seven-minute segments, the usual time between commercials? Do they require instant gratification? Do they feel a closer kinship to Oscar the Grouch than to their own cantankerous Uncle Oscar? Are they video zombies, listless and lethargic while viewing, revved up like the roadsters on The Dukes of Hazzard when they are not? As for parents, many of the same symptoms apply. Adults, however, are far more apt than children to deceive themselves about their own TV compulsion. Like alcoholics, says Wilkins, adults hooked...
...PUTS DIVA in a class above the usual plotty thriller is its bizarre setting. There are no romantic sidewalk cafes or sunsets over the Eiffel Tower in this Paris. Instead, the viewer enters a world of neon and cellophane and leather--a world in which vast underground garages contain video palaces and cats have names like "Ayatollah" and everyone lives in a loft. And yet, what makes this punked-out environment intriguing is that it contains many small reminders of the old Paris. Jules first meets Alba when he watches her shoplift records in a discomat. She is dressed completely...
Carson will celebrate his 20th anniversary in customary fashion this Sunday, Oct. 3, with a two-hour special (NBC, 9-11 p.m. E.D.S.T.) that will feature the usual complement of comedy, conversation and glitz, along with video-taped glimpses at the family album. If a few things go wrong along the way, so much the better. Carson's comedy thrives on crisis. It is fueled by failure. Carson craves bad jokes. They are the rough sand he turns into pearls...