[ssf] TV

[Dan]

Aye - it's the same with cars: here's some more from my radical liberal 
sociologist hero, Robert Putnam:

The average American spends 72 minutes every day driving.

"We spend measurably more of every day shuttling alone in metal boxes 
among the vertices of our private triangles" - this private triangle 
being from work to home to out of town shopping centre. According to 
Putnam's statistical analysis, this means that "each additional ten 
minutes in daily commuting time cuts involvement in community affairs by 
10%."

Whether pretending you're doing something by spending x hours a day 
writing e-mails about the state of the world = more or less 
engagement... hmm.

Dan
----
p.s. Someone please tell me if I'm spamming this list to death with my 
every random thought...


Chris Taylor wrote:

> Absolutely - I haven't had a TV for about 5 years, and although it 
> doesn't free me from the corporate tentacles, I'm convinced it makes 
> me less easy to control. People seem to be terrified of having time to 
> think these days - hence the perceived need for games on your mobile 
> phone to keep you occupied during a 10 minute bus journey.
> Perhaps we need to look at ways of competing with this kind of thing.
>
>
> */Dan <dan at aktivix.org>/* wrote:
>
>     Some old stuff. Relevant for the US; I've failed to find British
>     stats.
>
>     "TV turns out to be, for individuals, the single most consistent
>     predictor of civic disengagement. The television, by one estimate,
>     took
>     up 40% of the average American's free time in 1995, up by a third
>     since
>     1965. Americans, on average, watch four hours a day."
>
>     "Sociologist Robert Putnam’s conclusion is that an hour of TV
>     equals a
>     10% reduction in civic activism."
>
>     (Interestingly, the effects of the content of TV and viewing
>     habits is
>     clearly separated from TV per se. A comparison of news-watching
>     audiences to soap-opera watching ones showed the former to be
>     positively
>     correlated with civic engagement.)
>
>     :)
>
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