The Price of Civilization_ Reawakening American Virtue and Prosperity - Jeffrey D. Sachs [58]
We were, of course, forewarned early on about the manipulative power of the TV screen, by George Orwell in the 1940s, Vance Packard in the 1950s, the economist John Kenneth Galbraith and the media guru Marshall McLuhan in the 1960s, and the linguist Noam Chomsky in the past two decades. Joe McGinniss told us in 1968 that the image makers were now “selling the president” through television-based election campaigns.6 Yet, despite those warnings, Americans have continued to “buy the president” and whatever other products are on sale on the tube.
The amount of time now spent with electronic media is staggering. In a 2004 survey, eight- to eighteen-year-olds were in front of a TV screen roughly three hours per day; a DVD or movie, another hour; computers, video games, and handheld devices, another two hours; and audio consoles, another hour. That left twenty-three minutes per day for reading. Taking into account multitasking (using two or more media simultaneously), total media time averaged an astounding eight hours, thirty-three minutes per day.7 Our kids increasingly inhabit a virtual electronic world, much of it suffused with nonstop messaging and advertisements. Parents are only marginally less hooked, watching an average of three to four hours of television per day.
Of course, not one of those ads or expensive multimedia campaigns is telling us to buy less and save more. None are warning us to look skeptically at the thirty-second campaign spots designed to capture our vote. No advertisement is warning us to be aware of our susceptibility to bright colors, nice slogans, beautiful faces, suggestive gestures, and emotion-laden slogans. None teaches the public to ignore the pseudoscience that pours forth daily from corporate-financed PR campaigns. And certainly no advertising spot tells us to turn off the TV and read a book, go for a walk, or volunteer at a soup kitchen. The reason is obvious: there is no money in such messages. The $300 billion in advertising is mobilized instead to elect a candidate or sell a product, paid for by somebody who expects a commercial return on investment.
The effects of television go far beyond the direct message of the advertisements.
TV also shifted the center of gravity of society from the public park and the bowling alley to the privacy of our own homes, as couch potatoes in front of the giant screen. Over time, the single screen in the living room migrated into separate TV screens in each bedroom. Families retreated from other families, and then family members eventually retreated from one another. The political scientist Robert Putnam, in Bowling Alone, his magisterial account of the decline of civic engagement, found that time in front of the TV screen is the most powerful single characteristic accounting for the long-term decline in the time devoted to civic activities.
The cross-national evidence is highly suggestive: TV watching is bad for your social health (and your personal health as well). TV eats away at the social capital. Countries whose citizens watch more television have lower levels of social trust and higher levels of political corruption. The inverse relationship between TV viewing and social trust, which is statistically significant, is shown in Figure 8.1(a), which shows the estimated hours of TV watched per adult, varying from around 167 minutes per day by the Swiss to an astounding 297 minutes (5 hours per day) by Americans. There is a group of relatively low-watching countries (Switzerland, Finland, Sweden, Norway, the Netherlands), a group of medium-watching countries (France, Germany, Japan, Spain, Italy), and then the United States. We see that hours of TV watching are strongly inversely correlated with