Sunday, December 13, 2009

A Television In Every Home.

By Matthew Kerridge

The A. C. Nielsen Co., in doing its research has numbers saying the average American citizen, over a sixty five yr. Lifetime will spend slightly over nine years watching television. This translates to nearly twenty eight hours of watching per week and up a full two months per year in viewing! A simple indicator of our national obsession with 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 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.

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 can definitely be used as a valuable tool in learning, tele-communications, and many other things. With its over use as a social crutch, or simple distraction, its greatest flaws and detriments can be seen. The American public needs to be made aware of this and try to monitor viewing for far more productive things.

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