Monday, December 7, 2009

Our Nation And The Television 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.

Households in the United States have the highest ownership rate on earth today per-capita. With numbers over ninety-nine percent owning a minimum one, and standing at an average of not quite three TV sets in each home. These sets are turned on, (if being watched or even not) for almost seven solid hours per day on average, and when the term couch potato is being used, it does not fall too far from base does it?

Fully sixty percent of the population in the United States can name all members of the Three Stooges comedy team, but only fifteen percent of that same sampling are able to name any three of the nine sitting Supreme Court Justices of the United States. The television has been developmental in this over time.

The television was made commercially available in the early nineteen-thirties time frame. The first actual public broadcasts having been made from the Olympiad of nineteen thirty-six in Berlin Germany to government run stations in that city and Leipzig as well. This availed the games for viewing the first time to a nations populace. Due to sheer cost and a lack of programming, the television was not to make headway into peoples hearth and home until the mid part of the nineteen-fifties.

With sales of sets skyrocketing, the television had developed itself into an advertising tool as well and still is unmatched. Currently, broadcasters use up to thirty percent or more of available time for advertising. The average young child inside the United States, sees twenty thousand or more thirty second commercials each year. The results show effect on our retailers, manufacturers, and the base of our economy itself. Ask if you have been to a fast food restaurant today, and you would have gone but for the children coaxing of you, to get the newest toy or prize offered with a meal.

The average American youth spends nearly nine hundred hours per year in school. Now, comparing this to the fact that the same young child is spending very near, or more than seventeen hundred hours watching a television during the same years time frame! Since the early part of the nineteen-seventies, disparity in numbers like these has been advanced very steadily. Additions of various inventions like these; the DVD, the VCR, Blu-Ray systems, DVR and the like, we are rapidly adding to the already high numbers over recent years.

The television is, and can definitely be a valuable tool by use of learning, communications, and wise development. With the over use as a distraction or social crutch being its greatest flaw or detriment. The American public should be aware of this and attempt to monitor its viewing for more productive and responsible things.

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