TV Crimes

WAS it something in the fizzing space dust, the panda cola or the humungous spring rolls that has caused some adults born in the late Sixties and Seventies to obsess over other people’s children? Just what are they on?

If it’s not Jamie Oliver (born 1975) peering into Armani’s lunchbox, shaking his head and equating her fizzy restorative to a line of cocaine, it’s David Miliband (b. 1965), Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, telling us how we are killing the planet.

Now we hear from Markus Bindemann (b. 1979), a researcher in psychology at the University of Glasgow and co-author of Television at Face Value: Children’s Behaviour in Attention-Cueing Tasks.

Says Bindemann: “Faces are important social stimuli and it is surprising that children prefer to look at television instead. We learn social interaction — how to deal with people and how to read them — from looking at their faces. If you just stare at a box you don’t get any genuine interactions

Bindemann and his fellow researchers showed children aged between 6 and 8 pictures. When they were shown a picture of a TV screen alongside that of a smiling human face, more often than not the children looked first at the TV.

As the Times says: Children “respond to the image of a television as alcoholics do to pictures of drink.” We learn that when shown a picture of a glass of wine or pint of beer next to a face, most alcoholics respond to the drink.

And so it that TV is now a drug. What class of drugs remains open to debate.

And, as the paper also says, this research will “fuel fears that children are watching an alarming amount of television”.

Interestingly enough, these children in the survey were not shown flash cards but were sat before a computer screen. It was onto this monitor that pictures were broadcast.

And we all know what psychological damage staring at a computer screen can do. Don’t we?

Posted: 7th, November 2006 | In: Uncategorized Comment | TrackBack | Permalink