Is all this media exposure harming our kids?

A glowing television set is an irresistible force in any room. We simply cannot ignore it. We know this and we live with it.

Case in point: I visited the local bar a few weeks ago to celebrate a friend's birthday. We talked and laughed about recent exploits among our group of close friends. And every once in a while, I found myself drawn to one of the five little screens that hung above us. There was a TV set everywhere I turned.

When my eyes went to the TV, I seemed to enter a trance, even if for only five seconds. The chat was lost for a few moments. Then I pulled myself back to the party. This continued as long as I sat within view of a TV.

"Television Addiction is No Mere Metaphor," according to a 2002 study of the same name by Rutgers University Professor Robert Kubey and colleague Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. We already know from EEG studies that our brains are less stimulated during TV viewing than they are when we read a book, the authors note.

But those feelings of passivity and lowered alertness continue after we pull away from the set. And the sense of relaxation we experienced as we watched? It ends quickly after the set is turned off. The authors made their findings by following test subjects, using their "Experience Sampling Method." The subjects were beeped at random intervals, prompting them to write down their TV habits and the feelings they were experiencing.

The study found that after TV, the viewer's mood is about the same or worse than before. Symptoms during and after heavy TV viewing are about the same as if the viewer were addicted to drugs, the study found.

But how do these findings apply to computers and the Internet?
Kubey and Csikszentmihalyi say the same principles often apply, and it's all about what they call our "orienting response." An infant near a TV will crane its head to see a glowing TV, they point out. It's the primitive fight-or-flight mechanism at work, a.k.a., the orienting response. The baby becomes quiet and alert to what could be danger. And this is what’s happening to us adults and kids with every video we watch and every computer game we play. Our orienting response is being hit again and again.

The authors point to work of Annie Lang at Indiana University. She found that the typical music video activates the orienting response continuously. And if you put too many scene changes and jumps within a scene in any visual media, you overwork the orienting response. Then we fail to retain any of what we saw, she found.

Other studies provide both good and bad news on the effects of Internet use. The good news: the Center for Communication Policy at UCLA found in a 2004 study that the typical Internet user is “an avid reader of books” and spends more time engaged in social activities than the non-user. It also found that TV viewing is down by as much as five hours a week by Internet users, compared to those who don’t use the Internet.

The disturbing news: in their survey of Internet users in 14 countries, they found that most Internet users generally trust the information they find online. More than half of Internet users surveyed said "most or all" of the information they find online is reliable and credible. The South Koreans are the most trusting and the Swedes are the biggest skeptics, the study found.

But are we really learning less with all of this reading and viewing, than we were before the Internet? Maryanne Wolfe, a developmental psychologist at Tufts University and author of “Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain,” has an ominous view, as outlined in “Is Google Making Us Stupid,” by Nicholas Carr in the July/August issue of Atlantic Monthly.

When we read online, Wolfe says, we tend to become “mere decoders of information” because it’s coming at us so quickly and there’s so much information to absorb. And our ability to interpret text and make “rich mental connections” isn’t used when we merely decode, she says.

Or does all of this trouble lie in the misuse of our "orienting response"? When kids play video games for too long, for instance, they report feeling tired, dizzy and nauseous. Kubey and Csikszentmihalyi point to a 1997 incident in Japan, where 700 children were rushed to the hospital after they began suffering epileptic seizures brought on by a Pokemon video game on TV. If we could train our minds to shut off our fight-or flight response, maybe we'd rise above mere decoding. For now, we must arm our students with the tools to judge the information that they are absorbing. It's a start.