| Chapter 1: | The Orbit of the Eye |
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There is a decline in political participation, a decline in attendance at meetings (Rotary, Business and Professional Women, P.T.A.), at religious services, a decline in social clubs centered in sports or games (including bowling), a decline in home entertaining, a decline in picnics, a decline in volunteerism and philanthropic activities, even a decline in sending greeting cards.8
We Like to Watch: Passivity Rising
What activities are up? Putnam’s research shows a steady shift away from doing and toward watching . This pattern holds true for multiple spheres of modern life: making music (community bands and choirs, informal “jamming”) is down, attendance at rock or pop concerts is up; playing sports is down, watching others play sports is up; home entertaining is down, movie-going is up; most impressively, while virtually all socially interactive activities are down, television watching is up, way up. It can hardly be surprising that we have little time or energy for doing when the average American is now watching four hours of television per day.9 Between 1965 and 1995, Americans actually gained, on average, six hours of leisure time per week, but spent almost all of those six hours watching television.10
The consumption of time via the consumption of television is not that medium’s only danger. Equally pernicious is television’s ability to train heavy users in habits of psychological and physical passivity. Putnam points to time-use studies by Robert Kubey and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi showing that heavy television viewing is closely associated with abundant free time, sleep, feelings of loneliness, and emotional difficulties.11 British social psychologist Michael Argyle described the state of the television viewer as “relaxed, drowsy, passive,” while in a 1994 study, British researchers Sue Bowden and Avner Offer found that, of all household activities, television required “the lowest level of concentration, alertness, challenge, and skill… . Activation rates while viewing are very low, and viewing is experienced as a relaxing release of tension… . Metabolic rates appear to plunge while children are watching TV, helping them to gain weight.”12