TV brainwashed - photo by Aaron Escobar
More bad news from the economic depression.
The most recent “Three Screen Report” from the Nielsen Co. tracks TV watching across the three screens of television, computers and cellphones. The average amount of TV watched a month is a staggering 5 hours a day on average (151 hours a month), up 3.6% from 12 months ago.
As the L.A. Times put it: “Television executives (and space aliens) have the recession and the heightened interest in election coverage to thank for the increase in TV watching. People are staying in and watching the boob tube rather than spending money outside the house….”
And another depressing factoid for those who claim that at least if Americans are watching, they are watching together. There are now more TVs than people in an average American household, suggesting that more and more Americans are watching alone.
This is bad news because Robert Putnam has chronicled how lethal commercial, entertainment television has been to social capital in Bowling Alone. Basically, television has more than consumed all the increase in our leisure time since the 1960s, and is the only activity in which doing more of this is associated with doing less of everything else civicly (e.g., joining a group, or volunteering, or socializing with neighbors). Other activities (e.g., playing an instrument or going to a sporting event) are associated with doing more of other social and civic activities.
And it suggests that David Brooks’ prognosis that the recession may be bad for middle class social capital because it will lead to more cocooning may be true. Note: the NY Times is planning a story for next Thursday (3/5) on the social and civic impact of the recession.
Read The Nielsen Co.’s Three Screen Report or Television viewing at all-time high, LA Times story (2/24/09)
Hi Tom,
Great post. I remember a Time article Putnam put out not too long ago where he noted that while not completely proven yet, he had a strong sense about television being one of the biggest detractors from civic life/social capital.
I know the idea has come to mind for me before that it’s essentially like sitting in a room with the people you’re watching on TV–except for the critical fact that there is no interaction back and forth. It makes me feel like it would be a pretty sad form of relating to others to sit in a room with them where only one person would talk the whole time, with no back and forth exchange. This is of course an imperfect analogy, but I think it’s telling that this curious form of being exposed to people through television in a non-reciprocal fashion makes up so much of our leisure time as Americans…
As a sidenote, it can be used for great purposes, such as the massive viewing of Obama’s address to Congress this week (http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/25/obamas-speech-52-million-plus-tv-viewers/); but I think long-term answers lie in using technology such as TV and the internet as secondary tools to augment human interaction, not replace it.