Monday, December 7, 2009

One Nation, Under Television And Obsession.

By Matthew Kerridge

A. C. Nielsen Co., in its research says that the average American, in a sixty-five year life will spend nine years watching a television. This translates into twenty eight hours a week or two full months per year of viewing! Just an indicator of our obsession involving them.

United States households have the highest per-capita ownership rate in the world today, with over ninety-nine percent of them owning a minimum of one set, and holding an average of almost three sets in the home. Turning them on, (being watched or not) for nearly seven hours per day at average. When the term couch potato is used, it really is not too far off base is it?

A full sixty percent or more of the United States population is able to name all members of a comedy team like the Three Stooges comedy team, but but less than fifteen percent of the same number questioned being able to name any three Supreme Court Justices of the nine that sit on it. The modern television has been seen as an aid developmentally in this over a time frame.

The television became commercially available in the nineteen-thirties. First actual broadcasts being made from the nineteen thirty-six Olympiad in Berlin, Germany to stations in that city as well as Leipzig availing the games for the first time to a nations populace. Due to cost, the lack of programming, et cetera, the television did not make headway into peoples homes until the nineteen-fifties.

With sales growth in TV sets skyrocketing, the television began to develop itself into an advertising tool that remains unmatched. In recent years and currently, broadcasters are using up to a full thirty-percent or even more of their available broadcast time for advertising and sales. The average viewer or young child in the U. S. Today sees as many as twenty thousand or even more, thirty second commercials each and every year. The results can be shown in the effects on our restaurants, retailers, and even manufacturers, at the base of our whole economy itself. If you have been into a chain, or fast-food restaurant recently, and you would NOT have gone but for the children's asking of you, in their quest to get the newest toy or prize offered with a meal you already hold proof.

Average American youths spend around nine hundred hours in school per year. Now compare this, that same young child spends very near seventeen hundred hours or more watching television during that same year! Ever since the early nineteen-seventies, disparity in those numbers has been advancing steadily. With additions of the various inventions like; DVD, VCR, the Blu-Ray, DVR systems and the like, we are adding to these already heightened numbers during recent years.

The television is a valuable tool of communication, learning, and development. The over use of it as a distraction is its greatest detriment and flaw. The public needs to be aware of and try to monitor its use in more productive and responsible manner.

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