Kill your TV

After going for the past 30 years or so without any television whatever, except what we occasionally saw at a friend’s house, we recently took a major plunge and wound up with a big wall-mounted LCD monitor, HD digital cable, and a Mac Mini to play DVDs. We’ve lived for a few months now with that setup, and this story, from “The Frontal Cortex” science blog, does not surprise me.

After looking at the data, social scientists at The Johnson School at Cornell University noticed a striking correlation between exposure to television at an early age and rates of autism in three separate states. They concluded that their "findings are consistent with early childhood television viewing being an important trigger for autism"

Television is dreadful. There’s no other word for it. The shows are almost uniformly dreadful; the endless sequences of commercials coming at you like machine gun fire are dreadful; the sameness of thinking, of style, of narrative structure, amidst all that apparent diversity (200 channels!) is dreadful. The whole business of watching television induces slack jaw and slack mind. And now it seems likely that television has induced a plague upon our civilization in the form of a lifetime behavioral disorder that currently affects 1 in 166 children. Is there any way to stop it, short of the collapse of our technological infrastructure?