ON BECOMING FROGS: FIVE EFFECTS OF TELEVISION

It is a sad fact that many people simply surrender their entire home life to the whims of media executives. The general assumption seems to be that everybody must own a television and that everybody must watch that television a minimum of four to eight hours every day. No matter how violent, inane, or sexually provocative the content is we are expected to find this material entertaining. This is a perfect example of how the world insinuates itself into the life of a Christian. Millions of people who claim the Name of Christ in this country passively conform themselves to the world's standards, simply by regularly watching network TV fare. They become like the frog placed in a pot of cool water which is slowly heated until the frog is boiled to death. Because of the gradual change in temperature, the frog never becomes alarmed enough to jump out of the pot. So it is with people who have watched TV from childhood. They become so desensitized to violence and sexual immorality that they cease to have any reaction to material which would have been immediately banned from the movie house, not to mention the home, even several decades ago.

The real tragedy in all of this is the effect that regular television viewing has on children. Here we shall list just five of the many very serious effects that television has on children:

1) Potentially questioning, curious, family-centered, book and art loving five-year-olds become television zombies and lose the ability to question their environment. Interaction with other human beings is an essential life skill. Television deprives children of the tools for acquiring that skill. Television first hypnotizes and then numbs the imaginative capabilities of the child. If a child listens to a story as it is read from a book by a loving family member, he has the opportunity to formulate his own vision of that story in his mind. He can ask questions as the story progresses and make comments about various characters and situations as they occur. If he sees that same story on the television, he must sit passively and allow the TV to dictate every element of the story to him. Ultimately, many children grow to prefer this passivity to thinking about a story. The young student, therefore, loses interest in books, which approach life with more complexity than that offered by TV and which require him to think. Creative writing, diaries, letter writing, and the ability to discuss any topic for more than a few minutes - all of these diminish as the electronic device takes over.

2). By the age of ten schoolchildren usually exhibit changes in speech patterns as a result of watching TV. Television viewing causes children to become so passive that their verbal expressions are reduced to a minimum.

Ask your child about his school day. If the response you get is, muddled and incoherent, this is usually evidence that he has been watching too much television. This deficiency is in major part the result of absorbing rapid-fire television images, which never allow the child to formulate a response. By age eleven, having watched more than four thousand hours of television, the average American child has taken the majority of his English lessons from the TV screen, not from schoolteachers or books. There are few full paragraphs spoken on TV, almost no poetry, and no descriptive materials. Is it any wonder, then, that children cannot communicate intelligently?

3) Television inhibits meaningful family communication. A typical fourteen year-old girl talks with her mother in terms of actually discussing a subject in an intelligible way and in a sensible context for only about four minutes a week. We have allowed television-viewing, it seems, to take the place of normal dinner conversation and the exchanges between parents and children that are essential to child rearing. As television watching increases, family communication decreases. The TV comes to devour more and more hours in a young child's life, and almost nothing can compete with it for attention.

4) Creative silence , which allows us to contemplate our relationship with God in a deeply personal way, is discouraged by dependence on the ever babbling television . Children and adults who are from a home environment which has a constant background of TV noise become increasingly discomfited in the face of extended silence. They tend to develop the impression that silence is somehow wrong or unnatural. Prayer, then, can easily seem discomfiting, and Church Services long and unbearable. Thus, the value of quiet contemplation is never learned. A desire for silence, prayer, and contemplation, the foundations of deep spiritual growth, can only be developed in a peaceful atmosphere, ideally in a home where time is invested in personal and familial prayer, without the blare of TV or music.

The major issues of life are twisted and distorted by the media, which are primarily interested in creating spiritless consumers. Love, war, death, prejudice, history, the future, and, most importantly, God and the-fate of the human soul-all of these issues are either twisted, distorted, or ignored by TV "culture." Children and adults do not view television in a comprehensive context since TV never presents enough in-depth information for the viewer to have a context. News is presented in short "sound bites" which have been edited to portray a particular point of view. Documentaries concentrate on subjects which seek to titillate rather than inform and educate the audience. TV talk shows blatantly go about the business of portraying the abnormal-sex change operations, homosexuality, children who have murdered their parents, and every form of immorality imaginable without providing the viewer with a context into which he can place these things. Children especially, then, come to think of the abnormal as normal and as something to be accepted. Having no historical, cultural, or spiritual frame of reference, the good and the bad are jumbled together in a child's mind, with the good more than likely forgotten three days later. Such an empty creature, TV "experts" know, is quick to buy anything put before him. A spiritless, unthinking viewer, he becomes an indiscriminate consumer.

In view of its devastating effects on them, what sort of TV should we encourage our children to watch? The best thing, particularly for preschoolers, is no television at all. The sad fact, however, is that most parents, even in Orthodox homes, choose to use the television as a baby- sitter, rather than facing the responsibility of interacting with their own children. Children need to have stories read to them. They need time to play in ways which wilt exercise their imaginations and allow them to manipulate toys, which also develops hand-eye coordination. These things are best accomplished where there is no television. Older children need to see moral purity as a way of life. The excessive or gratuitous violence and sex portrayed on TV, with its glorification of materialistic attitudes, will not create such a vision. Thus, while it is perhaps not possible to remove the influence of television from their lives entirely, we must make clear rules for watching TV. Lewd programs must be forbidden in the home. The child should also be trained to leave a friend's house, if such programs are being viewed there, making it clear that he should quietly remove himself from the situation without a display of self-righteousness. Only if we are careful to limit TV viewing will we produce the kinds of sensitive, morally responsive children who have the character to avoid independently the very TV poison that destroys character.

Adults and TV. For adults, indiscriminate TV viewing poses dangers almost as serious as those posed for children. Repetitive exposure to immoral and vi olent situations and to secular, humanistic attitudes, which deny or ignore the spiritual side of man's nature, leads too subtle shift in our attitudes and beliefs. The people who write and produce network television live in a world which is far removed from that of a pious Orthodox Christian. Their world- view is generally devoid of any valid concept of spiritual life. Network television tends to express open disdain for moral purity in any form. For example, virginity is usually portrayed in a sarcastic and negative light. The American dream is portrayed as a quest for mediocrity in which the smart person is one who seeks to obtain the greatest return for the least effort. Situational ethics are the order of the day. These influences are far more insidious than we think, and they sometimes do more damage than the open violence and crude sex displayed on TV. The latter an adult can immediately identify as immoral and wrong, but subtle attacks on moral and spiritual values are not easy to see. They can, again, influence our attitudes and ideas without our even knowing it.

When we watch any TV program or any commercial, we must constantly evaluate what we are watching and compare its message or substance with the eternal standard of Orthodox Christian Truth: What would Saint John Chrysostomos have thought of this? How would Saint Peter have reacted to it? If we do this constantly, we can learn to discriminate a beneficial program from a questionable one. However, this requires that we remain vividly sensitive to what we watch. To do this, we must limit television viewing, make it secondary to the pursuit of silence and spiritual exercises (prayer, contemplation, spiritual reading, etc.), and constantly search for the source of the philosophies which underlie TV "culture." Otherwise, TV will take from us our ability to judge and to tell what is right from what is wrong. It is obvious that this will eventually negatively affect the Orthodox home itself.

-borrowed from A guide to Orthodox Life: Some Beliefs, -customs and traditions of the Church, by Fr. David Cownie and Presbytera Juliana Cownie.