I believe TV is bad for children. I don't know/I can't discribe exactly how it is bad. I have one clue, the constant change of reference view point. No scene lasts longer than 5 seconds before radically changing to a different point of view. As a child or if psychotic the editing is noticable, when a fully conditioned adult the editing transitions are seamless/un-noticed/filled in by the persons imagination. Watch/study a young child as they watch TV, when do they lose interest and look away puzzled? when there is radical-unexplainable visual point of view changes. This in adults make the TV compelling/hypnotizing to watch, the constant 5 second different camera view .

i'm a member of generation x or y or z or p or q or whatever the boomers have decided to call us now (and it's a distinctly boomer thing to nail names on proceeding and antecedent generations, like their lives depended on it).

and there's a shitfuckingtonhell of a lot more going on to screw with attention spans than our poor widdle undevewlloped bwains being bombarded with the inane bullshit that gets extruded through 30922352397569734 channels simultaneously. there's always one thing that gets left out of these articles about how tv/teh intarnets/etc are destroying our precious children: THE REST OF THEIR GODDAMN ENVIRONMENT. their environment, mostly created by paranoid boomers who want to look tough on crime so their kids don't turn into hippie scum or anything. there's no mention of the sink-or-swim-and-if-you-sink-we'll-be-pelting-cinderblocks-at-your head-until-you-sink-and-it's-for-your-own-good social environment that has come about today. it makes social darwinism (sorry, darwin) look downright posh.

there're plenty of reasons to tune out or just not give a fuck anymore for a young person today. way too many of them. one cause for these reasons that i've only heard brought up a handful of places is the social paradigm constructed by the boomers terrified that their own children might possibly taste of the same freedom, the same opportunity, that they did as young people. and so now, you cross the invisible line that no one told you existed, and you're in a psych ward getting tackled by ex-nfl linebackers to spend some time in the "quiet room" contemplating how authority figures are always correct no matter how arbitrary or incoherent their demands may be; and that to question those demands deserves punishment. brutal, brutal punishment.

there's a lot more going on down here at us kids' level, if anyone's willing to give a shit and actually listen to some uncomfortable facts about modern american society.

eh, fuck it. it's the tv, and those video games that are turning our pure innocent precious naive kids (who are totally devoid of personal agency until age 18 unless they commit crime, in which case they're adult enough to be tried as such) into robotic serial killers. i know i robbed the local national guard armory 'cause i played grand theft auto and saw how fun it was to blow stuff up with tanks 'n' stuff and there aren't any consequences or anything because you can just hit start and play over again. sigh.

Dear herbert incognito,
My generation had some legitimate gripes against our parents. The main one seemed to be they gave us "things" instead of their time and their honest selves.

So what did we do??? We did what they did, only in spades. We took it all to some kind of art form. I really don't get it. When I try to talk to my peers, um, my input isn't welcome. And I *do* make it a point to be tactful about it all.

It seems to me we've lost any concept of protecting very small children in this culture. We expose them to massive amounts of over stimulation, with no regard to their neurological development or need for regularity. I'm talking kids under the age of three. I see older kids scheduled beyond the point of endurance, with no concept that you really cannot do it ALL, or at least not all in the same bloody week. No eleven-year old should be stressed to the point of collapsing from exhaustion, but I'm seeing it a lot in my friends' kids.

We take kids--very young kids--to movies that have a sardonic undercurrent because there's no concept of simply taking a kid to the movie to entertain the kid--nope, we gotta be entertained also. After all, it's all about us, isn't it?

I don't know what the answer is, herbert, but do keep talking. Please. Thanks for writing. You're a breath of fresh air in my life.

stumbled in..

don't know why, but generational talk still gets my ire. hopefully i don't come off too agitated here. my view of generation x as a child, before generation x was pegged as such, was that we were some sort of evolutionary end, some abandoned project. as it turned out, in a large part, the boomer parents that ignored us then divorced and abandoned us, lived out some self-interests for a while, then re-surfaced to create new families, a new spawn, a new generation that would run parallel in time to the sons and daughters of their first brood.
as if civilization expected generation x, a small group to begin with, to procreate minimimally, it set up the baby boomers to diversify its reproductive portfolio into two sub-generations: x and y.
generation x, of course, is the unplanned an unwanted pregnancy of the wild, drunken youth.
generation y is the carefully thought out, cared
for, planned for, dare i say spoiled children who
were confronted with the issues of information overload, schedule maximization, gross egalitarinization, and having to deal socialize with the children of generation x.
i know that sounds pointed. i apologize. truth is, gen y, the millenials, are the beginning of the new way of the world; the eyes of humanity open on their face; i see that. my resentment is that of the bitter half-sibling watching the younger half-brother being spoiled rotten.
i have a half brother 25 years younger than me. believe it.
i get so angry thinking about the boomer generation and the hold they have had over the world in my time. the sad thing is, the last of them will not hit retirement age until a few years before i do. it's like i have to come big, or don't come at all - just to break the hold.
i have chosen with my life not to be a suburban corporate whack-a-mole, raising kids who compete with boomers children, working tenuous jobs at the mercy of boomers. no. i fly solo, trying to keep under the radar, and building for that "come big" hand.
i look at generation x as the messed-up big half-brother to the millenials. while there is a lame jealousy factor distorting relations, i/we can grow passed that and get to the natural blood love and commonality. there will be a day when the boomers will be out of the way. for now, they claw to the control and power of life and the world like megalomaniacal fascists at the helm of a million percolating utopias learning yoga and pilates, getting plastic surgery and eating pills, trying to figure out ways to live to 150 without letting anyone else know.

But, I digress.. I knew I would.

The effect on TV on kids. This is, as it has always been, a very intersting topic. What TV
brings to people is impact, and the impact is both physical and psychological.
The physical is in terms of activity; a persons time watching tv versus time engaged in other activities. inactivity leading to loss of strength, agility, etc. vision problems. headaches. such physical problems can be associated with tv.
in terms of psychological aspect, we are dealing with an influx of information. the impact of television on the psyche can be, to some, devastating. television has the ability to bring the world to the home, and where the home once was the world, the world becomes shattered. the lessons of the parents get shattered. the lessons of the school get challenged. the lessons of the bible are refuted. this can be done on one channel, very slowly, in one hour.
how might a person react to television? might one develop a tendency to stay in the house, restrict social interactions, reject authority, refuse religion, disrespect parents? it could happen.
i don't think it happened to me, even though i turned out that way. no, tv taught me patriotism (even though gomer pyle and hogans heroes were satirical, a dumbass child doesnt grasp that); tv taught me baseball (even though the yankees were horrible in 1970 and it was totally cool to be a hippie, i latched on to baseball);..
taught.. honestly, tv didn't teach me shit. the only things tv taught me were the things i watched alongside my dad, who explained things to me. i knew all about world war 2, for example. i watched cartoons, and to this day i don't know why. maybe it was just a kid thing to do.
the truth is, at that time, we are talking the 1970s, the boomers hadnt taken over the controls of the world from the "silent generation" just yet. i don't think the real imposition of tv was felt until the 80's, specifically with mtv. i think that was when tv began to be designed with intent, and the boomers had everything to do with it. up until 1980, kids were just kids, even if they were on drugs. then things gradually started getting weird.
two things were happening: mtv was becoming mainstream with the commonality of cable tv across america, and generation x were becoming teenagers.
my experience, my observation of mtv, is as
follows: the girls loved it, the boys hated it.
the only thing i ever liked on mtv was "beavis and butthead" and "jackass". i digress. wildly.
i was then, and remain, a prototypical gen xer.
i maintain that tv had minimal, if any impact.
i was an active, athletic child. i did not suffer
the divorce thing (though my parents tried to split when i was 7 and did split when i was 20).
i was a "latchkey kid" from the age of 6. i snapped at the age of 13 and i still really don't know why. i went into seething rebel mode. that was 1980 coincidently. maybe it was the microwave in the kitchen that set me off. who knows?
anyway, today, there are hundreds, thousands of channels to choose from. the pace of the information is frantic. we are barraged with information. and television, of course, is far from the only medium. the questions to the individual viewer in all of this may be "who am i?" and/or "where do i stand?".

i have this stupid chip on my shoulder. generation x was meant for some purpose, not any magnificent purpose, nothing self-gratifying. gen x was meant to call the boomers out on the error of their ways, force a generation y as penance, and then serve as big brother to generation y.

my message forward is this: protect and respect personal liberty; promote the highest potential in everyone you encounter; decide against fear; tomorrow is a whole new truth: lead the way.

stumbling out...