-Caveat Lector-
http://members.aol.com/FTUN/AMUSEDCOMMERCE.html
ARE YOU AMUSED?
With credit existing only in our thoughts, and the Federal Reserve
has said that their system "works only with credit", we are on the
THOUGHT STANDARD as opposed to a gold standard. You can think that
you have money and think that you pay taxes and think that
government spends money when they do not spend a dime in a system
that works only with credit. You can think that you are a free
person while others control your mind and your body by controlling
your thoughts but you are in fact a slave as was your parents and
grandparents before you.
To muse is to think; amuse is no think. Amusements inhibit serious
thinking. Actors, entertainers, ball players, hockey players,
musicians, pornographers, novelists, journalists, preachers,
teachers and others are highly rewarded with credit -- if they can
keep us from thinking about how we will get money for taxes in a
system that works us only with credit and why our use of credit
must be ruthlessly regulated by "taxation" and other unbelievable
means.
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http://dieoff.org/page22.htm
All that was required of them was a primitive patriotism which
could be appealed to whenever it was necessary to make them accept
longer working hours or shorter rations. And even when they became
discontented, as they sometimes did, their discontent led nowhere,
because, being without general ideas, they could only focus it on
petty specific grievances. The larger evils invariably escaped
their notice.
--George Orwell, 1984
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TV MUTANTS
There have been many studies which suggest that television
increases violence, increases tribalization, shortens attention
span and lowers school performance among heavy viewers. But that
is not my concern here. Instead, I am concerned that watching
television instead of reading tends to degrade the minds of heavy
viewers so that they can not think in abstractions such as "cause
and effect." In other words, the 100 billion dollars spent on
advertising each year, has simply burned abstract reasoning out of
their minds.
Today with functional magnetic resonance imaging (FMRI) and
positron emission tomography (PET), researchers catch brains in the
very act of cogitating, feeling or remembering. The scans show
that blood flow varies depending upon the type of activity the
brain is occupied with. In other words, a child that grows up
on a heavy diet of TV viewing has a physically altered brain.
Once adulthood is reached, it is still possible to enhance brain
function but it requires much more effort. Needless to say, it is
naive to expect TV-mutants to "figure it out" anytime soon.
In AMUSING OURSELVES TO DEATH, Neil Postman provides a brilliant
analysis of our TV-mutant society:
"We were keeping our eye on 1984. When the year came and the
prophecy didn't, thoughtful Americans sang softly in praise of
themselves. The roots of liberal democracy had held. Wherever
else the terror had happened, we at least, had not been visited by
Orwellian nightmares.
"But we had forgotten that alongside Orwell's dark vision, there
was another -- slightly older, slightly less well known, equally
chilling: Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. Contrary to common
belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy
the same thing. Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an
externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley's vision, no Big
Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity
and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their
oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities
to think.
"What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley
feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there
would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who
would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would
give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism.
Orwell feared the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared
the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared
we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a
trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies,
the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley
remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and
rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny 'failed to
take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions.'
In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure.
In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley
feared that what we love will ruin us.
"This book is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was
right." [p.p. vii-viii]
"From Erasmus in the sixteenth century to Elizabeth Eisenstein in
the twentieth, almost every scholar who has grappled with the
question of what reading does to one's habits of mind has concluded
that the process encourages rationality; that the sequential,
propositional character of the written word fosters what Walter Ong
calls the "analytic management of knowledge." To engage the
written word means to follow a line of thought, which requires
considerable powers of classifying, inference-making and reasoning.
It means to uncover lies, confusions, and overgeneralizations, to
detect abuses of logic and common sense. It also means to weigh
ideas, to compare and contrast assertions, to connect one
generalization to another. To accomplish this, one must achieve
a certain distance from the words themselves, which is, in fact,
encouraged by the isolated and impersonal text. That is why a good
reader does not cheer an apt sentence or pause to applaud and even
inspired paragraph. Analytic thought is too busy for that, and too
detached." [p. 51]
"I will try to demonstrate by concrete example that television's
way of knowing is uncompromisingly hostile to typography's way of
knowing; that television's conversations promote incoherence and
triviality; that the phrase "serious television" is a contradiction
in terms; and that television speaks in only one persistent
voice -- the voice of entertainment. Beyond that, I will try to
demonstrate that to enter the great television conversation, one
American cultural institution after another is learning to speak
its terms. Television, in other words, is transforming our culture
into one vast arena for show business. It is entirely possible, of
course, that in the end we shall find that delightful, and decide
we like it just fine. That is exactly what Aldous Huxley feared
was coming, fifty years ago."
[p. 80, Neil Postman, AMUSING OURSELVES TO DEATH; Penguin, 1985.
ISBN 0-14-009438]
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DOES TV VIEWING HARM KID'S BRAIN DEVELOPMENT?
With suspicions mounting that heavy TV viewing produces passivity
and attention disorders among children, brain scientists and
communications researchers gathered Oct. 2 in Washington, D.C.
to review the issue and plan future research efforts.
Psychologist Jane Healy, author of "Endangered Minds: Why Children
Don't Think and What We Can Do About It," opened the conference by
citing "an epidemic of attention-deficit disorders" and "diminished
higher-order thinking skills" as evidence that heavy TV viewing
may be harming children.
Healy said it was refreshing to attend a conference at which the
nation's schools and teachers are not being blamed for children's
academic weaknesses. "Teachers are not doing that bad a job nor
are the schools that much different. I believe this decline in
skills is not the fault of teachers."
Healy helped plan the conference, entitled "Television and the
Preparation of the Mind for Learning: Critical Questions on the
Effects of TV on the Developing Brains of Young Children."
The conference was sponsored by the Division of Children and
Families of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
Jane Holmes Bernstein, a researcher at Boston's Children's
Hospital, added that 20 percent of the nation's students have
"disorders of learning and thinking ... but consume more than
20 percent of school budgets" in remedial training.
The neuropsychology specialist noted the difficulty of studying
how TV affects a complex system such as the rapidly developing
brain interacting with the environment. "TV is embedded in a
socio-cultural matrix. It may simply be filling a gap. Other
cultural factors may be limiting conversation, therefore leading
to diminished linguistic skills," Bernstein said.
The most dramatic research presented was a set of experiments on
the developing brains of young rats by noted UC-Berkeley brain
scientist Marian Cleeves Diamond. She and her colleagues compared
the growth of brain tissue in rat pups in "enriched" environments
with those in "impoverished" environments.
Rat pups in enriched environments -- large, multi-family cages with
a variety of toys -- experienced significantly more brain growth
than rat pups in smaller, single-family cages with fewer stimuli.
The growth in brain tissue included blood vessels, nerve cells,
dendritic branching, synaptic junctions and cerebral cortex
thickness.
Diamond found that allowing the deprived rat pups to observe
passively the activity in the more stimulating cages yielded no
measurable benefit in their brain development.
"Mere observation is not enough to bring about changes" in brain
growth. "The animals must have physical interaction with their
environment," she said.
Psychologist Daniel Anderson cautioned against concluding
from research on rat pups that heavy TV viewing retards brain
development in children. The University of Massachusetts
researcher suggested that TV viewing may actually be more
interactive than passive.
He even suggested that the ability to attend other tasks -- such as
homework -- while watching TV or listening to the radio may improve
a child's ability to concentrate, since the extra stimulus produces
a state of increased arousal.
Though most conference participants seemed to view TV's harmful
influence on children as self-evident, Anderson was one of a
handful of contrarians seeking to provide arguments for
television's beneficence.
Another contrarian, Jennings Bryant of the University of Alabama,
attacked critics of "Sesame Street" who claim the program's
relatively fast pace clashes with the developmental needs of
young children.
He said a recent study comparing editing pace and/or length of
shots in TV programs found that prime-time shows such as "Coach"
averaged between 6 and 7 seconds per shot, while "Sesame Street"
shots averaged about 10 seconds.
MTV, by contrast, averaged less than 3 seconds per shot.
Though Bryant was able to demonstrate the more moderate pace of
"Sesame Street" compared to prime-time programs, some participants
felt the comparison missed the point.
"It's quite a commentary on children's TV when 10 second shots are
considered long," said Jane Healy, following Bryant's remarks.
Bryant is a former consultant to the Children's Television
Workshop, producer of "Sesame Street."
Yale University psychologist Jerome Singer called heavy TV viewing
"a clear hazard to children."
He and his wife and fellow researcher, Dorothy, have correlated
amounts of TV viewing among children with reading comprehension
scores.
They found that children who watched the most TV with the least
parental supervision had the lowest reading scores. By contrast,
children with low TV-viewing and high parental involvement had the
highest scores.
"How parents mediate their children's TV viewing is the critical
factor," Singer said. Parents who mediated via "discussion" rather
than "prescription" ( "That's not nice" ) were more effective, he
said. He advised "limited doses of TV with very careful parental
monitoring."
Psychologist Sidney Segalowitz of Canada's Brock University said
the growing visual and aural power of television threatens "a
child's ability to control his or her own attentional processes."
An age old, self-defensive brain function called the "orienting
reflex" ensures that "we are genetically drawn to novelty."
Segalowitz called for research to determine "how pervasive is
the failure to realize that one's attention has been captured?"
He also speculated that heavy TV viewing among children inhibits
"self-monitoring," a psychological response that helps the
developing child learn how to behave in various social settings.
"Self-monitoring is not required when watching TV," Segalowitz
said.
Published by CITIZENS FOR MEDIA LITERACY 34 Wall St, # 407,
Asheville, NC 28801 Phone: 704-255-0182 Fax: 704-254-2286
e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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