That's an overestimate, it's probably closer to 3 hours per day [1]. Also, if you exclude the elderly (like +55), it probably becomes significantly less.

> people feel that violence is everywhere

It really is though. Right now, there's a war going on in Europe. Curtailing it wouldn't make it go away.

> Research on the effects of viewing violence found a desensitizing effect, especially for children.

Like the vast majority of social sciences, that area is full of low-quality studies.

[1]:"In the 2013–17 period, the U.S. civilian noninstitutional population ages 15 and older spent an average of 2 hours 46 minutes per day watching TV." (https://www.bls.gov/opub/btn/volume-7/television-capturing-a...)

The world would probably be much better if people watched less TV.

Yes. I totalle agree. I think social was most important for me. The problem with TV is that it fulfills those needs but very inefficiently. It takes a lot of time of lying inert in front of TV to get any significant fulfillment. And the insidious part is that because people are lying down they think they are resting. But that's rarely true. Lying down especially for hours tires you even more.

So TV provides you with versatile fulfillment but at very slow rate and at a significant cost that's not easy to notice.

A friend grew up in a household where his mother forbade TV and video games. During this covid-19 lockdown, instead of mindlessly watching TV like everyone else appears to be doing, he built a deck and is rebuilding his garage among other projects. Every other friend I talk to is sitting around drunk, high or watching TV. Few do some projects but it's mostly TV show chatter in the chat apps.

Personally I don't hate TV and I have netflix. Though I only really watch it in spates and when it is on, I am on my laptop or doodling in my notebooks. It's more for background noise than content. Though of course there are some times when I'm tired and just want to sit and watch an episode of a show.

As a child this seemed unreasonable and unfair, right up there with not having pizza as often as I wanted, or other similar not-actually-traumatizing problems. Then I became aware of how much time my peers spent staring at TVs, filling their mental spheres with the ephemeral details of forgettable TV entertainment. And none of them were reading anything.

I was very happy we didn't have one.

Later in life I got a TV to watch rental movies. That was great.

Then I tried cable for two years and lived with the dreck for a while. Everything was clearly designed to communicate to stupid people! Even the history and science programs are ridiculously dumbed down.

But the worst by far was the "news". The faux partisan battles that turned into real partisan battles with two (not always equally) incoherent sides. The same people banding together on each side (there are almost always exactly two sides!) of every issue.

BUT worse than the news was the advertising. People are so used to it they don't see it for what it blatantly is. Completely bizarre communication techniques doing only one thing: Brainwashing! Repetition of nonsense phrases, ridiculously happy/sad people, products shown in painfully contrived situations, ...

The problem with news and advertising isn't just that they are misleading, or that they are dumbed down, or that they are designed to be emotionally addictive.

The worst problem is that exposing ourselves to constantly repetitive irrationality creates thinking grooves in our minds. It dumbs us down both in terms of how we think, but even worse, all the higher forms of thinking we never develop, that we are channelled away from.

I quit cable after two years. That was enough for a lifetime lesson. Movies, quality TV series, there are actually enjoyable inspiring things to watch.

But I live a life almost completely devoid of any commercials, and no video news, talks shows, etc., at all.

And by reading I am far more "informed" and more importantly, have a greater, constantly growing "understanding" of people, power, the practical (people) side of economics, etc.

--

I don't think it is a coincidence that the massive societal and personal problems associated with video news and a partially egregious scrapbooking web site are both associated with content produced to coerce us to watch advertising we would otherwise never choose to expose ourselves too.

It is all a toxic brew. Avoid all advertising in you life. You will avoid 99% of the junk and be a much better version of yourself.

I have threatened to drop a friendship when a friend kept sending me stupid baiting political memes. He finally understood me: It is not that it was specifically stupid or wrong, it is that I don't tolerate mental poison like that. Not even from a friend.

There’s lack of reading, albeit not necessarily due to television (https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/01/the-dec...)

There’s a direct link between television and obesity (http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/75/5/807)

And more general health dangers (http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/newsplus/prolonged-tel...)

Etcetera

The whole first or second chapter of Bowling Alone is about network effects causing downward spirals in socialization, with TV as the primary substitute. It's basically the same story as Haidt's. They were probably right.

Television WAS terrible. I have many older relatives who are basically zombies whenever one is on. It has crippled their ability to critically think, it indoctrinates them, and leads to numerous health complications

Just because a population has been adequately addicted doesn’t mean the addiction isn’t a problem

Now fast forward to today and realize that these modern digital drugs can be many many times more potent than your TV of yesteryear

“Lots of broad assertions and little evidence to back them up”

Friend I think you need to put down your screen and take a long hard look at what the world is and where it’s heading

Not really. At best you can avoid watching TV yourself -- but you can't easily avoid living in a city/country influenced by tv culture.

I don't think we do - television viewing has dropped off a cliff over the last decade or so. Many people don't own one any more.

> It doesn't. There's no way of consuming TV that has a negative impact on people.

because Fox news and it's various talk shows have absolutely rotted boomer and elderly folks' brains.

Arguably most TV (and now streaming internet video) content is just purely an advertising delivery medium where content is a distant second if that.

I suppose you could even say that Fox News delivers more actual content than a lot of TV shows, but unfortunately it is carefully crafted brainwashing content. So in terms of a well functioning brain, it does also effectively cause rot.

And the DnD point was a callback to the 1980s, when Nancy Reagan and Tipper Gore types were hunting for demons everywhere.

But since you didn't ask, I'll tell you what most of these things have in common: they're all indications that humans have too much time on our hands, and that we don't have enough productive work to do (or that we can motivate ourselves into doing).

And in the case of movies and illiteracy, there is certainly a large segment of Americans under the age of 50 who consume virtually all of their fiction and even non-fiction by video. And if Grammarly is evidence, then it's clear there is an illiteracy problem. We know that a way to get good at something is to do it and do it more, but reading and writing aren't being done much at all by most people. Even in the business world it is astonishing how low the communication quality has fallen.

While I'm making jabs at "leaders", I'll point out that Donald Trump's communication level was below 5th grade standards (https://blog.factba.se/2019/10/03/not-stable-genius-again-or...) ... not to mention the level of decorum dropped to kindergarten level with name-calling and making fun of disabled people.

I'm certain that an entire population of people routinely seeing their leader behave this way did lower thinking ability and behavior. Ergo, TV does rot brains.

silverbax88 seems to state that the introduction of television was similarly heralded by people bemoaning that it would cut back on social interaction. He then dismisses this, as if the idea were absurd. I also see a lot of Singularatarian types with nearly religious fervor with comments like: "If others perceive you to be inattentive because you check your phone, that's old-world thinking." Now, upthread, joe_the_user makes a rather important point that the changes which we're discussing here impact younger generations the most, it's not the old farts who are used to the next big thing, but the children who have no natural resistance to the addictive stimuli. Back to the television. While Silverbax88, one of the self-admitted "old farts" was not drawn in by the evil TV monster, it strikes me as a child of the nineties as completely disingenuous to assert that a sea-change did not take place in terms of consumption of television, and specifically on how the increased consumption of TV time correlated with a dramatic drop-off in social interaction.

I refer specifically to my generational cohort, and how I observed our outside time diminishing as we got older. I remember many afternoons in 1998-99 playing Duke Nukem 3d for hours and being prompted by parents with phrases like, "Don't you want to go out and play with your friends?" something I thought especially silly the few times I would go out and no one would be outside as they were all... playing video games and watching TV.

This is hacker news, not anecdote TV, so let's see if I can dig up some actual statistics:

According to Vandewater, Bickham, and Lee [1] :

Results indicated that time spent watching television both with and without parents or siblings was negatively related to time spent with parents or siblings, respectively, in other activities. Television viewing also was negatively related to time spent doing homework for 7- to 12-year-olds and negatively related to creative play, especially among very young children (younger than 5 years). There was no relationship between time spent watching television and time spent reading (or being read to) or to time spent in active play.

So we're left in an interesting situation. On one hand we have a lot of people who are concerned over the explosion of potentially isolating technologies, and on the other we have people who seem to blindly assert that everything will be dandy, because, you know it always has been before. Who do we consider conservative here?

To bring this to sort of a close: I feel the same sort of fundamental discomfort as does artursapek with the concept of replacing socialization, something which I've only recently began to really embrace as a nerd, with an electronically mediated digital analogue. While researching my TV statistic, I saw a lot more papers about the PC-accessed Internet, which I think to be a better metaphor for Google Glass than TV ever was. A lot of these papers such as [2] come to conclusions like: Results suggest that frequent users tend to be lonely, to have deviant values, and to some extent to lack the emotional and social skills characteristic of high EI.

[1] http://www.pediatricsdigest.mobi/content/117/2/e181.short [2] http://online.liebertpub.com/doi/abs/10.1089/109493104322820...

EDIT: staring at a computer screen all day is also associated with quite a few negative effects -- whether working or playing.

People keep saying this but directly contradicts the observed experience of the vast majority of people.

Everytime I meet a no TV guy they have a laptop or a 37 inch monitor in the corner of a room somewhere with a comfy chair. It wasn't they had no TV, they just had a crappy TV.