TV-Turnoff's travail

Back in 1994, an organization called TV-Turnoff Network was started to alert the public to the consequences of watching too much TV.

The fallout included (and still includes) obesity, social isolation and depression, lack of exercise, addictive behavior, poor school performance, an acceptance of violence, hyper-consumption, personal debt, eating disorders, and the erosion of family time.

The list went on and on, and new concerns were raised along the way. Pediatricians began telling parents that no child under the age of two should watch any TV — NONE.

Of course the TV/media industry wasn’t having any of that, and responded with “Baby Einstein” and “Baby Mozart.” The DVDs were marketed to suddenly Einstein-fixated parents of children in the very age group the doctors deemed most vulnerable.

Disney (whatever happened to Baby Dumbo?) now owns the “baby prodigy” programs.

TV-Turnoff’s way of fighting back was organizing a week without TV — once a year. The week’s events were arranged around the schools, often by parents. The hope was that families would enjoy their week without TV so much that they’d cut back on viewing once the week was over.

Of course, TV wasn’t the only concern. Other electronic media were working their way into our lives. To meet the new challenge, TV-Turnoff morphed into “The Screen-time Awareness Network.”

When TV-Turnoff began, the average American was putting in four hours a day in front of the tube. Put another way, if the average American lived 75 years, that’s works out to nearly 12.5 years in front of the TV.

Imagine yourself reaching 75 and wondering what you could have done with those 12.5 years of 24 hours days besides watch the tube?

So after 15 years of TV-Turnoff weeks and Screen-Time Awareness, how much time is the average American logging in front of the TV (to say nothing of computer screens).

The answer is: four hours and 49 minutes according to a recent Nielsen reports.

That’s more than a 20 percent increase and an all-time high.

So why have the numbers defied the efforts of TV-Turnoff?

According to one story, “researchers say the continued increase in television consumption can be attributed to several factors including: more television sets in the home; more channels and content to choose from; and greater use of personal video recorders.”

I’ll venture another reason. The message of TV-Turnoff isn’t being disseminated by the media, particularly by TV, the most influential media.

If it isn’t on TV it isn’t part of the culture. In short, we are what we watch, and — surprise, surprise — messages telling us about the harmful consequences of too much TV watching aren’t appearing on our screens.

The TV industry and the advertising industry, its Siamese Twin, rely on maximizing the number of eyeballs viewing ads. The ads propel the profits. The TV and advertising industries, so essential to the consumer economy, certainly don’t want those viewers camping in the mountains, hiking the back-country, reading a good book or visiting with family and friends.

So TV-Turnoff gets no traction. And the time Americans spend with TV goes up and up — even as it takes us down and down.

One organization that is using screens to good advantage to educate students and others is the Media Education Foundation. The organization produces and distributes excellent documentaries about media issues.

For more on the Nielsen audience study, go here. You can find out about TV-Turnoff here, but, sadly, the website seems to be unattended. You can’t even find the dates for the 2010 TV-Turnoff. In the past it has been the third week in April.

Privacy and other internet lessons

For the first time since I started this blog some nine months ago, I’ve pulled a posting off the site. In it I had discussed changing the name of the Northwest Media Literacy Center to, well, something else.

The something else turned out to be a “pretty good name,” in the opinion of a “naming consultant” who wandered onto the posting after his search snagged one of my search engine tags. He suggested that we protect the proposed name by registering it before someone else did.

The problem is that our organization hasn’t agreed on the name, but the response from the naming consultant increased our interest in the name, and gave several of us pause.

I decided to go private with our seemingly valuable thinking about names. I deleted the post and its comments.

The experience with the naming posting is just the most recent to raise my awareness of the huge promise and troubling pitfalls of this medium.

I’ve had an Italian T-shirt merchant comment on a post, in Italian. His pitch to get you to his site was deleted. Interestingly enough, he too was responding to our proposed name.

Only a couple of other spammers have tried to lure Red Electric readers to commercial sites. They were likewise deleted. Alas, I'm certain that won't be the last of them.

The Red Electric’s site meter has provided interesting data. The site averages 40 visits a day. When I wrote about the Portland Timbers recently, visits shot up to 60. In fact, my choice of topic and resulting search tags drive up (or down) numbers of visits markedly.

I’m often surprised by the topics that attract the most attention. For instance, a post on the misuse of apostrophes was a magnet for grammarians far and wide. So if you want grammarians, tag a post, any post, “apostrophe.”

Attracting hordes is not my goal here, but responses provide insight into how audience surveys like the Nielsen ratings can drive media content. If TV producers and magazine editors feel even a nibble of interest, they’ll yank on the topic in hopes of landing a big audience — which, of course, drives up advertising rates.

Think Paris Hilton and the observation about her being famous for being famous. Or is it being famous for being cute or coy or sexy or incarcerated or rich or all of the above….

And no, I won’t tag this “Paris Hilton,” but it is tempting.