Creating Television: Conversations With the People Behind 50 Years of American TV
A Volume in LEA's Communication Series, © Copyright 2004
Robert Kubey (kubey@scils.rutgers.edu)
Director, Center for Media Studies (www.mediastudies.rutgers.edu)
Professor, Dept of Journalism & Media Studies, Rutgers University
Based on Prof. Kubey's commentary on the recent Pediatrics article:
Dimitri A. Christakis, Frederick J. Zimmerman, David L. DiGiuseppe, and Carolyn A. McCarty. Early Television Exposure and Subsequent Attentional Problems in Children Pediatrics 2004; 113: 708-713
An important study but we need to recognize the possible limitations.
Robert Kubey (6 April 2004)
I've read the article and am impressed by this study and believe it makes an important contribution to the field.
I especially appreciate the authors' own excellent caveat, in which they
write:
"Third, we cannot draw causal inferences from these associations. It could be that attentional problems lead to television viewing rather than vice versa. . . .It is also possible that there are characteristics associated with parents who allow their children to watch excessive amounts of television that accounts for the relationship between television viewing and attentional problems. For example, parents who were distracted, neglectful, or otherwise preoccupied might have allowed their children to watch excessive amounts of television in addition to having created a household environment that promoted the development of attentional problems."
The news media will doubtlessly report on this study as if there IS a causal relationship even though the authors rightly warn against doing so, and they are to be admired for being candid about this in their write-up.
Partialling out SES and numerous other variables is always important in such work, but unless the work was done with a great deal many more questions to parents, it is nearly impossible to know if there are important differences in parental style and approach to television and other activities that might help explain the results.
But this team has made a very important start and it's important that the study be replicated, and that variations of the study be conducted in different nations and locales.
"Pediatrics" asks contributors if they have an interest in the area and I do indeed as I've long suspected that shortened attention spans are encouraged by a good deal of contemporary media. I commented on this in my work on the "intolerance for unstructured time" (Kubey, 1986, Journal of Communication), in my 1990 book with Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, "Television and the Quality of Life" (Erlbaum), and in our more recent Scientific American article on so-called "Television Addiction" from Feb. 2002. And many others have as well.
Let me add, in my own interviews with leading creators of American television, many of which date back to 1987 and up and through 2003, that a great many of the over 100 people I have interviewed have reported to me, when asked, that THEY believed that the attention span of the American public was indeed growing shorter. Forty of these interviews are reported in my book (2004), "Creating Television: Conversations with the People Behind 50 Years of American Television" and I will be happy to make some of relevant quotes available for those who might be interested. Or I could post them on this site if people wish to see them. The Rutgers News Service will be doing a release on this book and its findings probably later this week, or next.
But here's the point--most everyone working in the media ardently believes they must pander to a shortened attention span: producers and reporters in print, radio and TV news, and in every other entertainment medium. So, even if the media didn't somehow cause any initial shortening of the public's attention span, there is no question in my mind that media producers have long created products and more rapidly intercut their materials in order to attract and hold on to people's waning attention and interest levels. And this, then, might well have had an effect in its own right, even if there was no real effect to begin with.
The development of advertising and experimental film techniques that influenced the style and intercutting ratios in music videos has been a matter of great influence on the popular culture and subsequently on editing styles in film and television and advertising, once again.
Byron Reeves and Annie Lang and their colleages at Stanford and at Penn State, respectively, have demonstrated that rapid cuts can activate the primitive, biologically and evolutionarily grounded "orienting response" in people, and this is referred to in the important Jerome Singer article cited in the current piece.
Let us not forget the Harvard study that showed that the average length of soundbite for presidential candidates on national TV news in 1968 was about
45 seconds whereas it dwindled down by a factor of 5 to only about 8-9 seconds, I believe as early as 1988. And it's stayed low subsequently. CBS tried to lengthen their soundbites for presidential candidates in 1992, I believe, letting the bites run at least 30 seconds but they killed the policy within about a week's time. I believe this was reported in the New York Times sometime in 1992 or perhaps it was 1996.
Moreover, a number of researchers over the years have made observations, or commented on the real possibility that children's attentional and impulse control and ability to stay on task, and tolerate frustration, might all be negatively affected by over-exposure to television.
Subsequently, though I don't follow it as closely, critics of video games and computers have made similar claims.
I do not share in the propensity of all too many researchers to demonize the media. There are wonderful things on television for people of all ages, but everything in life, and especially for young developing minds, needs to be done in moderation.
There may be positive influences, as well, as a result of exposure to rapidly edited media, and with video and computer play as well. There is reason to believe, for example, that recent increases in IQ scores around the world are partly attributable to video and computer game play (see Patricia Greenfield and others on this). To my knowledge, which is limited here, there has been no better explaination offered for this secular trend. And frankly, I think it possible that even the mind puzzles that kids run into on cereal boxes, in school, increasingly in restaurants, may have prepped them, more than past generations, to do well with certain IQ type questions, especially in spatial relations.
Furthermore, I ardently believe that video and computer games can enhance some people's inductive and deductive reasoning skills. Many such games require players to think about how things work in the game and to come up with winning strategies. Of course, all too much videogame content is violence, sexist, jingoistic, and sometimes overtly racist. But this does not mean that there aren't intellectual benefits that may accrue to some individuals who play certain games that challenge their eye-hand coordination, ability to quickly access visual and auditory stimuli, or deductive and inductive reasoning.
And though it is a skill that some may critique, the U.S. military, and I believe a number of other countries, use video and computer game simulations to help train pilots and others who need to respond very quickly and accurately to rapidly changing visual stimuli.
But one more intriguing idea that I have seen elsewhere. There was speculative work done some years ago that suggested that the PARENTS of kids with ADHD might view heavily themselves, both as a way to escape their ADHD kid/s and/or that the children might try to act out more, and behave in more kinetic ways, perhaps like the people on TV, in order to gain the attention of their parents who are so absorbed with watching TV.
Here, the argument was made that kids are trying to simulate, in their behavior, what they sense the parents are attracted to on the TV screen that the parents are watching so much. A scary thought and a pretty wild one, but I thought I'd add it as it IS in the literature at least in speculative discussion, and while it probably doesn't explain the behavior of many children, or perhaps ANY children, it could conceivably be a contributing factor in some families where the parents are glued to TV.
Thus, looking at parental level of viewing is an important co-variate to consider in this sort of work.
At bottom, this is a very important study and should shake up a lot of researchers around the world to closely study the topic, and it should also encourage increased funding by the USPHS and various foundations in funding more basic scientific research on the influence of media, especially in developing children.
R. Kubey, Rutgers
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