How Viewers Grow Addicted To Television
THE
proposition that television can be addictive is proving to be more than
a glib metaphor. The most intensive scientific studies of people's
viewing habits are finding that for the most frequent viewers, watching
television has many of the marks of a dependency like alcoholism or
other addictions.
For instance, compulsive viewers turn to television for solace when they feel distressed, rather than only watching favorite programs for pleasure. And though they get temporary emotional relief while watching, they end up feeling worse afterward.
For a decade or more, researchers have pursued the hypothesis that some television viewers are addicted to watching. But only this year have a handful of studies produced the strongest evidence yet that some compulsive viewers are indeed addicted under standard diagnostic criteria.
There is no definition of television addiction on which all researchers agree. But people who call themselves ''television addicts,'' studies find, watch television twice as much as the average viewer. One study found that self-described addicts watched an average of 56 hours a week; the A. C. Nielsen Company reports the average for adults is just above 30 hours a week.
For instance, compulsive viewers turn to television for solace when they feel distressed, rather than only watching favorite programs for pleasure. And though they get temporary emotional relief while watching, they end up feeling worse afterward.
For a decade or more, researchers have pursued the hypothesis that some television viewers are addicted to watching. But only this year have a handful of studies produced the strongest evidence yet that some compulsive viewers are indeed addicted under standard diagnostic criteria.
There is no definition of television addiction on which all researchers agree. But people who call themselves ''television addicts,'' studies find, watch television twice as much as the average viewer. One study found that self-described addicts watched an average of 56 hours a week; the A. C. Nielsen Company reports the average for adults is just above 30 hours a week.
Recent
studies have found that 2 to 12 percent of viewers see themselves as
addicted to television: they feel unhappy watching as much as they do,
yet seem powerless to stop themselves.
Portraits of those who admit to being television addicts are emerging from the research. For instance, a study of 491 men and women reported this year by Robin Smith Jacobvitz of the University of New Mexico offers these character sketches:
A 32-year-old police officer has three sets in his home. Although he is married with two children and has a full-time job, he manages to watch 71 hours of television a week. He says, ''I rarely go out anymore.''
A 33-year-old woman who has three children, is divorced and has no job reports watching television 69 hours a week. She says, ''Television can easily become like a companion if you're not careful.''
A housewife who is 50, with no children, watches 90 hours of television a week. She says, ''I'm home almost every day and my TV is my way of enjoying my day.''
Insights on Normal Viewing
The studies also shed new light on more ordinary viewing habits, showing that people who are emotionally dependent on television simply represent extremes of behavior seen from time to time in most viewers.
In a study comparing television viewing with leisure activities like sports, reading or gardening, television fared poorly as a diversion. While ordinary viewers say television relaxes them while they watch, afterward they feel far less relaxed, less happy and less able to concentrate than after participating in sports or other leisure activities.
To be sure, many people in the television industry, as well as some researchers, object to the idea that the medium can be addictive.
''People may watch to kill time or for escapism, but I've never seen anything conclusive that shows television to be psychologically addictive,'' said Richard Ducey, senior vice president of research and planning with the National Association of Broadcasters in Washington. ''It's a proposition with no support, except in some metaphorical sense, the same way you might be addicted to dessert.''
The issue of whether the most frequent viewers of television are addicted to it is being argued against the backdrop of a larger debate within psychiatry on the nature of addiction itself. For the most part, psychiatry has held to a strict definition of ''addiction,'' restricting its use to describe dependence on a substance like heroin to which the body develops a tolerance and shows withdrawal symptoms when deprived of it.
But in the current version of the psychiatric diagnostic manual, issued in 1983, the category of addiction was redefined and broadened to include compulsive behaviors that people turned to for relief from distress, and continued to rely on despite negative effects on their emotional or social functioning.
''Under the broader definition, many kinds of compulsive behavior could be considered addictive, including obsessive sex or compulsive television viewing,'' said Dr. Allen Frances, a psychiatrist at Cornell University Medical School, who is overseeing the revision of the diagnostic manual.
Watering Down of Concept
''However, the broad definition is under debate,'' he said. ''Many of us think it has become too vague, watering down the concept of addiction.''
The most commonly used scale to measure television addiction includes using television as a sedative, even though it does not bring satisfaction; lacking selectivity in viewing; feeling a loss of control while viewing; feeling angry with oneself for watching so much, not being able to quit watching and feeling miserable when kept from watching it.
''They turn on the TV when they feel sad, lonely, upset or worried, and they need to distract themselves from their troubles,'' said Robert McIlwraith, a psychologist at the University of Manitoba. Dr. McIlwraith reported his findings on television addiction at the annual meeting of the American Psychological Association in Boston last August.
The most exhaustive data on television watching data is from studies done between 1976 and 1988 on several different groups involving close to 1,200 men and women who volunteered to fill out questionnaires about their activities and moods whenever they were alerted by beepers they carried.
In analyzing the data for people's television-watching habits, Robert Kubey, a psychologist now at the School of Communications at Rutgers University, worked with Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a psychologist at the University of Chicago.
Their findings are reported in ''Television and the Quality of Life,'' published this year by Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. While their conclusions are drawn from the studies involving more than a thousand people, the most detailed results come from a study in which 107 men and women reported on their experiences at randomly selected moments throughout the day for a week.
The third of the men and women in the smaller study who watched television the most were markedly different from the rest of those studied. As a group, the compulsive watchers were more irritable, tense and sad than the others, and felt they had little control over their lives.
For most people, there was a strong relationship between being in a bad mood and watching television to get out of it. The strongest pattern predicting that people would watch television in the evening was that in the morning they felt the day was going badly, and by the afternoon they were in a bad mood.
Lowered Brain Activity
For all viewers, researchers have found, television tends to elicit a state of ''attentional inertia,'' marked by lowered activity in the part of the brain that processes complex information. That inertia, said Dr. Kubey, may explain why a mediocre television show can have high ratings if it follows a popular one.
''It's common for people to say they are selective television watchers,'' said Dr. Kubey. ''They'll say they sat down just to watch 'L.A. Law,' but they're still watching three hours later. A great many people feel powerless to get up and turn it off.''
For compulsive viewers, that inertia becomes extreme, so that the longer they watch, the more passive and less discriminating they become, Dr. Kubey found.
Oddly, while most people said they were more relaxed while watching television than they had been before starting, they ended up feeling far less relaxed once they stopped. ''We found no evidence that television offers emotional rewards that extend beyond viewing,'' Dr. Kubey said. Moreover, the longer people watch television, the less rewarding they find it, the intensive study of 107 people showed.
These experiences with television were strongest among the compulsive viewers. Not only did they report feeling worse than most people as they watched television, but their spirits drooped all the more once they stopped watching. What little lift they get from television, though, is enough in many cases for most frequent viewers to become dependent on it, Dr. Kubey said.
An additional pressure to watch television for the compulsive viewers arises from feeling uncomfortable when they are alone with nothing to do, the study showed. For such people, idle time is unpleasant, making them all the more ready to seek solace from television.
Testing Addiction Theories
In other recent research, Dr. McIlwraith tested several theories of television addiction in a study of 135 students at the University of Toronto. In his study, the one in eight students who said they were addicted to television watched twice as much as the others: 21 hours a week instead of 10.
One prominnent theory of television addiction, proposed by Jerome Singer, a psychologist at Yale University, holds that people who watch too much television from childhood grow up with a deprived fantasy life. For them, watching television substitutes for their own imagination. But Dr. McIlwraith found no difference between the television addicts and other students in their abilities to have pleasant, vivid fantasies on their own.
Another theory, proposed by psychoanalytic theorists, is that television addicts have an ''addictive'' personality, which makes them vulnerable to dependencies of all kinds. But Dr. McIlwraith found no evidence for that view. ''Television addicts don't eat more junk food, or smoke or drink more alcohol than other groups,'' Dr. McIlwraith said.
Instead, his study supported the findings of Dr. Kubey. The addicts were far more likely than other students to say they watched TV when feeling lonely, sad, anxious or angry, and to use it to distract themselves from things that bothered them or when they were bored. 3 Patterns Identified From this study and another of 476 men and women done with John Schallow, a psychologist at the University of Manitoba, Dr. McIlwraith has identified three main patterns of television use. ''One common use is to alter mood,'' Dr. McIlwraith said. ''These people turn on the television when distressed. Another is to fill time when you are bored. People who feel they are addicted fall into extremes of these types.''
On the other hand, he said, ''there is a rarer group who use television selectively. They tend to watch only a few favorite shows.''
Portraits of those who admit to being television addicts are emerging from the research. For instance, a study of 491 men and women reported this year by Robin Smith Jacobvitz of the University of New Mexico offers these character sketches:
A 32-year-old police officer has three sets in his home. Although he is married with two children and has a full-time job, he manages to watch 71 hours of television a week. He says, ''I rarely go out anymore.''
A 33-year-old woman who has three children, is divorced and has no job reports watching television 69 hours a week. She says, ''Television can easily become like a companion if you're not careful.''
A housewife who is 50, with no children, watches 90 hours of television a week. She says, ''I'm home almost every day and my TV is my way of enjoying my day.''
Insights on Normal Viewing
The studies also shed new light on more ordinary viewing habits, showing that people who are emotionally dependent on television simply represent extremes of behavior seen from time to time in most viewers.
In a study comparing television viewing with leisure activities like sports, reading or gardening, television fared poorly as a diversion. While ordinary viewers say television relaxes them while they watch, afterward they feel far less relaxed, less happy and less able to concentrate than after participating in sports or other leisure activities.
To be sure, many people in the television industry, as well as some researchers, object to the idea that the medium can be addictive.
''People may watch to kill time or for escapism, but I've never seen anything conclusive that shows television to be psychologically addictive,'' said Richard Ducey, senior vice president of research and planning with the National Association of Broadcasters in Washington. ''It's a proposition with no support, except in some metaphorical sense, the same way you might be addicted to dessert.''
The issue of whether the most frequent viewers of television are addicted to it is being argued against the backdrop of a larger debate within psychiatry on the nature of addiction itself. For the most part, psychiatry has held to a strict definition of ''addiction,'' restricting its use to describe dependence on a substance like heroin to which the body develops a tolerance and shows withdrawal symptoms when deprived of it.
But in the current version of the psychiatric diagnostic manual, issued in 1983, the category of addiction was redefined and broadened to include compulsive behaviors that people turned to for relief from distress, and continued to rely on despite negative effects on their emotional or social functioning.
''Under the broader definition, many kinds of compulsive behavior could be considered addictive, including obsessive sex or compulsive television viewing,'' said Dr. Allen Frances, a psychiatrist at Cornell University Medical School, who is overseeing the revision of the diagnostic manual.
Watering Down of Concept
''However, the broad definition is under debate,'' he said. ''Many of us think it has become too vague, watering down the concept of addiction.''
The most commonly used scale to measure television addiction includes using television as a sedative, even though it does not bring satisfaction; lacking selectivity in viewing; feeling a loss of control while viewing; feeling angry with oneself for watching so much, not being able to quit watching and feeling miserable when kept from watching it.
''They turn on the TV when they feel sad, lonely, upset or worried, and they need to distract themselves from their troubles,'' said Robert McIlwraith, a psychologist at the University of Manitoba. Dr. McIlwraith reported his findings on television addiction at the annual meeting of the American Psychological Association in Boston last August.
The most exhaustive data on television watching data is from studies done between 1976 and 1988 on several different groups involving close to 1,200 men and women who volunteered to fill out questionnaires about their activities and moods whenever they were alerted by beepers they carried.
In analyzing the data for people's television-watching habits, Robert Kubey, a psychologist now at the School of Communications at Rutgers University, worked with Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a psychologist at the University of Chicago.
Their findings are reported in ''Television and the Quality of Life,'' published this year by Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. While their conclusions are drawn from the studies involving more than a thousand people, the most detailed results come from a study in which 107 men and women reported on their experiences at randomly selected moments throughout the day for a week.
The third of the men and women in the smaller study who watched television the most were markedly different from the rest of those studied. As a group, the compulsive watchers were more irritable, tense and sad than the others, and felt they had little control over their lives.
For most people, there was a strong relationship between being in a bad mood and watching television to get out of it. The strongest pattern predicting that people would watch television in the evening was that in the morning they felt the day was going badly, and by the afternoon they were in a bad mood.
Lowered Brain Activity
For all viewers, researchers have found, television tends to elicit a state of ''attentional inertia,'' marked by lowered activity in the part of the brain that processes complex information. That inertia, said Dr. Kubey, may explain why a mediocre television show can have high ratings if it follows a popular one.
''It's common for people to say they are selective television watchers,'' said Dr. Kubey. ''They'll say they sat down just to watch 'L.A. Law,' but they're still watching three hours later. A great many people feel powerless to get up and turn it off.''
For compulsive viewers, that inertia becomes extreme, so that the longer they watch, the more passive and less discriminating they become, Dr. Kubey found.
Oddly, while most people said they were more relaxed while watching television than they had been before starting, they ended up feeling far less relaxed once they stopped. ''We found no evidence that television offers emotional rewards that extend beyond viewing,'' Dr. Kubey said. Moreover, the longer people watch television, the less rewarding they find it, the intensive study of 107 people showed.
These experiences with television were strongest among the compulsive viewers. Not only did they report feeling worse than most people as they watched television, but their spirits drooped all the more once they stopped watching. What little lift they get from television, though, is enough in many cases for most frequent viewers to become dependent on it, Dr. Kubey said.
An additional pressure to watch television for the compulsive viewers arises from feeling uncomfortable when they are alone with nothing to do, the study showed. For such people, idle time is unpleasant, making them all the more ready to seek solace from television.
Testing Addiction Theories
In other recent research, Dr. McIlwraith tested several theories of television addiction in a study of 135 students at the University of Toronto. In his study, the one in eight students who said they were addicted to television watched twice as much as the others: 21 hours a week instead of 10.
One prominnent theory of television addiction, proposed by Jerome Singer, a psychologist at Yale University, holds that people who watch too much television from childhood grow up with a deprived fantasy life. For them, watching television substitutes for their own imagination. But Dr. McIlwraith found no difference between the television addicts and other students in their abilities to have pleasant, vivid fantasies on their own.
Another theory, proposed by psychoanalytic theorists, is that television addicts have an ''addictive'' personality, which makes them vulnerable to dependencies of all kinds. But Dr. McIlwraith found no evidence for that view. ''Television addicts don't eat more junk food, or smoke or drink more alcohol than other groups,'' Dr. McIlwraith said.
Instead, his study supported the findings of Dr. Kubey. The addicts were far more likely than other students to say they watched TV when feeling lonely, sad, anxious or angry, and to use it to distract themselves from things that bothered them or when they were bored. 3 Patterns Identified From this study and another of 476 men and women done with John Schallow, a psychologist at the University of Manitoba, Dr. McIlwraith has identified three main patterns of television use. ''One common use is to alter mood,'' Dr. McIlwraith said. ''These people turn on the television when distressed. Another is to fill time when you are bored. People who feel they are addicted fall into extremes of these types.''
On the other hand, he said, ''there is a rarer group who use television selectively. They tend to watch only a few favorite shows.''
Final exam questions Media:
ReplyDelete1. Why the "Eagle video" became so successful?
2. How can mass media be useful in spreading propaganda?
3. How important is television in today's world?
4. How important is television in your life? What kind of TV programs do
you watch (if any)?
5. Does televisiom generally have a positive or negative influence?
6. Can the Internet fully compete with television?
7. How can the television bring people together?
8. Why has it been said that TV is a social killer? How can watching TV be
addicitve?
9. Are there any circumstances in which mass media censorship can be
justified? Does the freedom of media still exist?
10. What does it mean that the piece of information is in "public
interest"? Provide examples.