Social context Post # 4

Boob Tube and Children's Brain Drain
By: Don Oldenburg

Dan Oldenburg writes this article dealing with the effects of the TV on the development of children's brains. In the introduction Oldenburg states that the average child will watch 22,000 hours of TV when they graduate from high school, that is twice the amount spent in the classroom. Oldenburg also states that the amount of study that goes into this epidemic is not nearly enough to gain any real insight into the problems at hand. Oldenburg continues his argument by stating some f the facts from the limited research that has been done, he also states his opinion on this problem and brings the focus into the hands of the parents, the most important people in the lives of children must step up and do something.

Now I am a bit bias about this article, that may be because my husband and I have chosen not to have a TV in our house. This being said I can agree to what Oldenburg is leaning to in this article, TV is something that is not really beneficial to our society so why are we making it seem like it is? One of the main reasons why we do not have a TV is because it eats up so much of our time. If you do not have one that is a non issue and there is more time for other things like reading or going outside.

There was an add that merely Shoes put out that I found quite interesting:

The weather channel, the Nature channel, the Outdoor channel.... Is our TV trying to tell us something?

Get Outside!!

I think that if more people took this seriously our society would not have the problems that we have today.

I do not know what will happen when we have kids... I don't know if there will be too much pressure to get a TV or if my views will change, but from where I stand now, I feel like I would be better off never having another black box enter my house.

I know that there are some good things about having a TV, like watching the news and such... Although how much of that is reality??... Anyways I think that there are other ways to get news, we listen to a lot of CBC and also read the paper, so there are ways to stay up on what is happening.

It scares me to think that some of the items talked about in the article may be true, what are we doing to the next generation? How can this be ok? When is there more research going to be done?

I guess I have more questions than answers...