During the course of the International Year of the Family, Alan Mirabelli, Director of Communications for The Vanier Institute of the Family, spoke with parents and community groups all across Canada. Following are excerpts of what he told them about families, communities and television.

Virtual unreality: television, families and communities in the nineties

by Alan Mirabelli

When television was introduced in the 1950s, it was very quickly accepted as a new guest in the home. In Canada, the US, and across Europe, adults and children soon began watching three hours of television a day. Forty years later, this hasn't changed. We continue to watch television three hours a day, seven days a week, though some of that time is now devoted to videos and video games. Our use of television has changed in significant ways, however, as our families and communities have changed.

A guest in the home

We saw television originally as being a way to experience things that we couldn't normally encounter. We watched the drama of the Kennedy shooting and men landing on the moon. Similarly, cultural events were brought into our homes. We saw television as being enriching.

It also was something that families did together. The television, with few channels available, was in the family room. Watching a particular program on a Sunday evening was a special event that was negotiated among family members.

Today we rarely use the medium to stimulate discussion. Instead, we tend to isolate ourselves. There is a television set up in the bedroom. There is another one in the kitchen. Everyone has a choice and programming is targeted to various groups. Teenagers watch programs that are appropriate to teenagers and elderly people watch programs that are more suited to their taste. When family members get together, they can no longer discuss common experienre based on what comes in through the television set.

Hang on, I'm busy

Something else goes on in families in terms of how they use television and how it affects family time. The medium of television works in real time. If you are interrupted, you'll miss it. It differs from reading in this way. So if your child comes to you and says "I want to tell you about something that happened today," you might say, "Shh, hang on a minute I'm watching the news." This also happens between spouses or other family members.

In the old days you might go down the street to the café or the local theatre when you were feeling ignored. If you were absent from the household several evenings in a week, the person who stayed home began to realize that there was a problem because the physical separation - the aloneness - spoke volumes.

Today we distance ourselves with the medium. Sitting on the opposite ends of a couch watching television, we can satisfy ourselves that we're together. The whole process of human engagement, however, may be subservient to the fact that we have chosen to watch three hours of uninterruptable television a night. This is not the fault of the medium but of the way we, as human beings, have chosen to use it to put off the messy part of human life which is interaction.

Socializing children through the tube

Interaction is central to the socialization of children. Because changes in our family and community lives have dramatically diminished the diversity of experiences and interactions available to children, television has become the main socializer of our children by default.

One reason for this is the time crunch that most families experience. With most parents away at work during the day, we tend to live our family lives between the hours of 5:30 and 7:30, when we start putting children to bed. Most adult family members spend 40 to 50 hours a week at work, 56 hours sleeping and 30 hours doing housework and personal care. Add to that the 21 hours a week that the average person spends watching television and there is little time left for community and family activities. Between school, homework and sleeping, children have little more time than adults. And they spend the same 21 hours watching television.

This means that all kinds of family and community activities get compressed. The socialization of children that occurs from engaging in other activities diminishes as the time available diminishes.

When children do engage in alternative activities, it is rarely in diverse groups and situations. More and more Canadians have sought the refuge of a suburban community where the neighborhood is filled with people of similar economic and educational backgrounds and similar occupational interests. Children are further isolated when they are organized by age, gender and interest in school and other organized activities. The peer group becomes the prime influence in their lives. Community and family have a very limited role in the socialization of children.

Unlike many cultures in which children are included in mainstream community life, in North America, we privatize children. If people intervene in the upbringing of our children we tend to tell them to mind their own business. And we avoid intervening with others for fear of the reaction of the child or parent.

If children are not participants in the community and don't encounter or interact with different kinds of people, how do they find out what others' lives are like? How do they know what it is like to be a young parent with an infant? How can they understand how it feels to be frail and to have to ask others for help? How do they determine what their behaviour ought to be down the road when they may fmd themselves in those situations?

Children will pick up cues from somewhere. Nowadays, those cues are likely to come from the television set -- by default -- because that is where children spend the vast majority of their free time. And that is also the only place where they will encounter diversity. Television learning is limited, however. It develops familiarity with many things, but real understanding grows out of lived experience and reflection on the meaning of those experiences.

Television has become the main socializer of our children by default.

Virtual experience vs lived experience It is our withdrawal from the living community that gives television its power because children decide what is real and what is not based on the experience they bring to the television set. If they have lived experience, for instance of conflict between parents, they are likely to know that people feel frustrated now and then, that there are limits to the expression of that frustration, and that love and affection usually follows the resolution of a conflict.

Children without this lived experience may take their cues from "action programming" on television. On television, physical violence is the predominant mode of conflict resolution. In the absence of "real life" experience, children are bound to be unduly influenced by such models of behaviour.

Locking the doors

Our withdrawal from the community and our use of the media also influence our perceptions of the world around us. After a long harried day, we are quite prepared to come into our castle, close the door, lock it, put the three chains across it and then turn on the television set in order to perceive what is going on in the world outside.

Something happens when you do this. You may obtain information about your community through the television, but you cannot really "know" it without being out there.

The issue becomes vital when we look at the violence depicted on television. The television newscast tends to highlight the more violent situations that develop in a community. This violence may represent a very small part of the total life of a community. But if you sit at home and watch three hours of newscasts and dramatized violence every evening, you begin to perceive the world as far more violent than it is. It doesn't matter whether it is based in Detroit, Chicago, Montreal, or Toronto - it feeds the perception that the society or community in which you live is far more violent than it is in reality.

This can lead to a greater sense of insecurity and fear, particularly if you are a part of one of the groups often represented as victims. Canadian seniors, for example, may feel a need to take many unnecessary precautions to protect themselves.

Our perception that the community is a violent place leads to even less participation in the community. We lock ourselves away and watch the local newscast night after night. The newscast confirms the feeling that the streets are unsafe. So we become even more insular instead of realizing that we are vulnerable because we're not public - because we don't know each other and don't care to know each other.

A child is vulnerable when there is no one else on the street who knows who the child is, where the child belongs and who all the neighbours are. If a stranger approaches a child in an actively involved community, everyone knows that he is a stranger who doesn't belong in that neighbourhood and the child is protected.

Kids and TV - the research

Almost as long as there has been television, there has been a debate about the possible negative effects of television viewing - especially on young viewers of violent programming. The debate continues. While some researchers argue that direct casual links can not be proved, The Effects of Media Violence on Children (1993, National Clearinghouse on Family Violence, Health Canada) cites various studies that suggest that:

there is a correlation between exposure to television violence and aggressive behaviour, both verbal and physical; children who behave more aggressively when provided with toys that appear in scenes of televised violence. children who watch a great deal of violent television will tolerate more aggressive behaviour in other children before calling another adult for help; children, by the age of three, will imitate a televised model to the same extent as a live model; people who watch a lot of television tend to be more fearful; television may desensitize viewers to violence; children between the ages of 6 and 10 may be particularly sensitive to the effects of television; adults can have a significant effect on what children learn from TV.

The CRTC and the Standing Committee on Communications and Culture say that while research findings are not conclusive, the evidence that television contributes to the societal violence is strong enough to merit action to reduce television violence, especially in programs directed at children.

Television - here to stay

Television may be apart of a cycle of individual and family isolation, but the medium itself cannot be blamed. What we see on television - the content - is only one part of the problem. Of greater importance is the way we tend to use television in our daily lives to confirm our isolation and avoid interaction. This kind of usage of the medium may leave some of us without adequate experience in the real world to interpret and assess what we see on television.

The choices about how we use television and how much we use it remains ours. As individuals, we can decide to exercise those choices thoughtfully, both for ourselves and our children. We can lead our children to alternative activities.

As a society, we can acknowledge the influence of television in the socialization of our children and take steps to ensure that we produce programming worthy of them.

Alan Mirabelli is the Director of Communications for the Vanier Institute of the Family

This article was published by the Vanier Institute of the Family, 1994

Posted by Vanier Institute of the Family, October 8/96.

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