In 2005, Norman Mailer said people should be able to pay to watch TV w/o commercials.
07-27-05, 08:55 AM
#1
In 2005, Norman Mailer said people should be able to pay to watch TV w/o commercials.
This article was written in 2005.
But the writer seems to be stuck in the 20th century.
Hasn't this guy ever heard of TV on DVD?
http://archive.parade.com/2005/0123/0123_one_idea.html
One Idea
By Norman Mailer
Published: January 23, 2005
Many years ago, I had a good friend who died from a grievous impasse in his body. Open-heart surgery was not then as highly developed, and he had high blood pressure plus a heart valve that passed blood. The high blood pressure aggravated the leak, but the drug to lower such pressure relaxed the valve. Then, more blood seeped forth. He was caught in an insuperable bind.
Something comparable may be going on today in our educational system. Three Presidents so dissimilar as George H.W. Bush, William Jefferson Clinton and George W. Bush have all been equally concerned with the need to improve our public schools. These three men are not at all alike, but they have been in general agreement on this matter for the last 16 years. In 2001, a most important bipartisan bill, No Child Left Behind (NCLB), was passed by a vote of 87-10 in the U.S. Senate. It was a major attempt to solve a major difficulty. Our test scores, in comparison with those of other developed countries, showed that America’s best students might be on par with the best from other developed countries, but when we looked at the size of the gap in scoring between our average students and our poor ones, we ranked as the 21st lowest of 24 industrial nations. That was shocking.
The 21st century opened with an emphasis on globalism and technological development. But to succeed in global competition, literacy is necessary among even the lower-paying jobs. Small clerical errors that might be committed at the bottom can build up into large errors at the top, and the consequent need for close checking can consume valuable productive hours.
Moreover, technology and globalism depend on high skills in the STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering and mathematics), yet this is precisely where our best students do not excel. Foreign students who come to study in this country seem happier in these matters. To quote Scott Bass’ piece in The Boston Globe in February of 2003, “Between 1986 and 1996, foreign students earning STEM field Ph.D.s increased at a rate nearly four times faster than domestic students. In 2000, 43 percent of our physical science Ph.D.s went to non-U.S. citizens.”
So, NCLB became one of George W. Bush’s first priorities. Many hopes were attached to it. The underlying concept was that our public schools, from kindergarten through to the 12th grade, had to do better. Yearly testing would now begin, and federal money to encourage better training for the weakest students would be made available to every one of our 50 states. There would be annual tests, and those schools that failed to improve would be penalized or, in the most drastic cases, closed. AYP (Adequate Yearly Progress) became the benchmark. Each school would be held accountable for its results.
One large obstacle remained. There was not enough money to take care of the problem. By 2003, the states were already suffering a combined budget deficit of $58 billion, but the new cost for NCLB would come to an additional $84 billion. Corporate, property and state income taxes would have to be raised drastically. That could prove to be political suicide for many state legislators. The U.S. government also came up short, and to the tune of $27 billion. The combination of tax cuts plus the war in Iraq had swollen the national deficit. As one of the finer educational minds in America, William J. Mathis, put it: “There is scant evidence that the AYP train can even get out of the station.”
Even with appropriate funding, educators saw other problems awaiting them. NCLB would call for an unholy emphasis on doing well in tests. This could produce a narrowing of educational goals. Answers to true-or-false or multiple-choice questions would become the drill, and the ability to write essays might fall to the side. That was bound to aggravate another weakness: High school students were showing reduced interest in books. In 2002, among our teenagers and young adults, the drop from 1982 in books read annually came to more than 25 percent.
If the desire to read diminishes, so does one’s ability to read. The search for a culprit does not have to go far. There are confirming studies all over academia and the media that too many hours are devoted each day to the tube. Television is seen as the culprit, since the ability to read well is directly related to one’s ability to learn. If it is universally understood that the power to concentrate while reading is the royal road to knowledge, what may not be perceived as clearly is how much concentration itself is a species of psychic strength. It can be developed or it can go soft in much the manner that body muscle can be built up or allowed to go slack. The development of physical ability is in direct relation to use. Reading offers its analogy. When children become interested in an activity, their concentration is firm—until it is interrupted. Sixty years ago, children would read for hours. Their powers of concentration developed as naturally as breathing. Good readers became very good readers, even as men and women who go in for weight-lifting will bulk up. The connection between loving to read and doing well in school was no mystery to most students.
With the advent of television, the nature of concentration was altered. Yet children could still develop such powers by watching TV. Video and books had a common denominator then—narrative.
In the early years of television, it was even hoped that the attention children gave to TV would improve their interest in reading. Indeed, it might have if TV, left to itself, consisted of uninterrupted narratives. That, of course, was soon not the case. There were constant interruptions to programs—the commercials.
Every parent has had the experience of picking up a 2- or 3-year-old who is busy at play. All too often, a tantrum occurs. Even as adults, we have to learn to contain our annoyance when our thoughts are broken into. For a child, an interruption to one’s concentration can prove as painful as a verbal rebuke.
Yet this is what we do to our children for hours every day. On the major networks, the amount of time given to commercials and other promotional messages increased by 36 percent from 1991 to 2003. Each of the four major networks now offers 52 minutes of commercials in the three hours from 8 p.m. to 11 p.m. every day. It is equal to saying that every seven, 10 or 12 minutes, our attention to what is happening on the tube is cut into by a commercial. It is as bad for most children’s shows. Soon enough, children develop a fail-safe. Since the child knows that any interesting story will soon be amputated by a kaleidoscope of toys, food, dolls, clowns, new colors and the clutter of six or seven wholly different products all following one another in 10-, 20- and 30-second spots all the way through a three-minute break, the child also comes to recognize that concentration is not one’s friend but is treacherous. For soon enough, attention will be turned inside out. The need to get up and move can become a frantic if routine response for highly keyed children. Other kids, stupefied by the onslaught of a quick series of ads that have nothing to do with each other, suffer a dire spiritual product—stagnation. They sit on the couch in a stupor, they eat and drink, and alarms are sounded through the nation. Our children are becoming obese.
What, then, is to be done? These six words falter before problems that are comparable to the impasse that visited my old dead friend. We have an economy that is stimulated by TV advertising. Yet the constant interruption of concentration it generates not only dominates much of our lives, but over the long run also is bound to bleed into our prosperity. The rest of the world is getting into position to do far better than us with future economic conditions.
If we want to have the best of all possible worlds, we had better recognize that we cannot have all the worlds. I believe that television commercials have got to go. Let us pay directly for what we enjoy on television rather than pass the spiritual cost on to our children and their children.
But the writer seems to be stuck in the 20th century.
Hasn't this guy ever heard of TV on DVD?
http://archive.parade.com/2005/0123/0123_one_idea.html
One Idea
By Norman Mailer
Published: January 23, 2005
Many years ago, I had a good friend who died from a grievous impasse in his body. Open-heart surgery was not then as highly developed, and he had high blood pressure plus a heart valve that passed blood. The high blood pressure aggravated the leak, but the drug to lower such pressure relaxed the valve. Then, more blood seeped forth. He was caught in an insuperable bind.
Something comparable may be going on today in our educational system. Three Presidents so dissimilar as George H.W. Bush, William Jefferson Clinton and George W. Bush have all been equally concerned with the need to improve our public schools. These three men are not at all alike, but they have been in general agreement on this matter for the last 16 years. In 2001, a most important bipartisan bill, No Child Left Behind (NCLB), was passed by a vote of 87-10 in the U.S. Senate. It was a major attempt to solve a major difficulty. Our test scores, in comparison with those of other developed countries, showed that America’s best students might be on par with the best from other developed countries, but when we looked at the size of the gap in scoring between our average students and our poor ones, we ranked as the 21st lowest of 24 industrial nations. That was shocking.
The 21st century opened with an emphasis on globalism and technological development. But to succeed in global competition, literacy is necessary among even the lower-paying jobs. Small clerical errors that might be committed at the bottom can build up into large errors at the top, and the consequent need for close checking can consume valuable productive hours.
Moreover, technology and globalism depend on high skills in the STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering and mathematics), yet this is precisely where our best students do not excel. Foreign students who come to study in this country seem happier in these matters. To quote Scott Bass’ piece in The Boston Globe in February of 2003, “Between 1986 and 1996, foreign students earning STEM field Ph.D.s increased at a rate nearly four times faster than domestic students. In 2000, 43 percent of our physical science Ph.D.s went to non-U.S. citizens.”
So, NCLB became one of George W. Bush’s first priorities. Many hopes were attached to it. The underlying concept was that our public schools, from kindergarten through to the 12th grade, had to do better. Yearly testing would now begin, and federal money to encourage better training for the weakest students would be made available to every one of our 50 states. There would be annual tests, and those schools that failed to improve would be penalized or, in the most drastic cases, closed. AYP (Adequate Yearly Progress) became the benchmark. Each school would be held accountable for its results.
One large obstacle remained. There was not enough money to take care of the problem. By 2003, the states were already suffering a combined budget deficit of $58 billion, but the new cost for NCLB would come to an additional $84 billion. Corporate, property and state income taxes would have to be raised drastically. That could prove to be political suicide for many state legislators. The U.S. government also came up short, and to the tune of $27 billion. The combination of tax cuts plus the war in Iraq had swollen the national deficit. As one of the finer educational minds in America, William J. Mathis, put it: “There is scant evidence that the AYP train can even get out of the station.”
Even with appropriate funding, educators saw other problems awaiting them. NCLB would call for an unholy emphasis on doing well in tests. This could produce a narrowing of educational goals. Answers to true-or-false or multiple-choice questions would become the drill, and the ability to write essays might fall to the side. That was bound to aggravate another weakness: High school students were showing reduced interest in books. In 2002, among our teenagers and young adults, the drop from 1982 in books read annually came to more than 25 percent.
If the desire to read diminishes, so does one’s ability to read. The search for a culprit does not have to go far. There are confirming studies all over academia and the media that too many hours are devoted each day to the tube. Television is seen as the culprit, since the ability to read well is directly related to one’s ability to learn. If it is universally understood that the power to concentrate while reading is the royal road to knowledge, what may not be perceived as clearly is how much concentration itself is a species of psychic strength. It can be developed or it can go soft in much the manner that body muscle can be built up or allowed to go slack. The development of physical ability is in direct relation to use. Reading offers its analogy. When children become interested in an activity, their concentration is firm—until it is interrupted. Sixty years ago, children would read for hours. Their powers of concentration developed as naturally as breathing. Good readers became very good readers, even as men and women who go in for weight-lifting will bulk up. The connection between loving to read and doing well in school was no mystery to most students.
With the advent of television, the nature of concentration was altered. Yet children could still develop such powers by watching TV. Video and books had a common denominator then—narrative.
In the early years of television, it was even hoped that the attention children gave to TV would improve their interest in reading. Indeed, it might have if TV, left to itself, consisted of uninterrupted narratives. That, of course, was soon not the case. There were constant interruptions to programs—the commercials.
Every parent has had the experience of picking up a 2- or 3-year-old who is busy at play. All too often, a tantrum occurs. Even as adults, we have to learn to contain our annoyance when our thoughts are broken into. For a child, an interruption to one’s concentration can prove as painful as a verbal rebuke.
Yet this is what we do to our children for hours every day. On the major networks, the amount of time given to commercials and other promotional messages increased by 36 percent from 1991 to 2003. Each of the four major networks now offers 52 minutes of commercials in the three hours from 8 p.m. to 11 p.m. every day. It is equal to saying that every seven, 10 or 12 minutes, our attention to what is happening on the tube is cut into by a commercial. It is as bad for most children’s shows. Soon enough, children develop a fail-safe. Since the child knows that any interesting story will soon be amputated by a kaleidoscope of toys, food, dolls, clowns, new colors and the clutter of six or seven wholly different products all following one another in 10-, 20- and 30-second spots all the way through a three-minute break, the child also comes to recognize that concentration is not one’s friend but is treacherous. For soon enough, attention will be turned inside out. The need to get up and move can become a frantic if routine response for highly keyed children. Other kids, stupefied by the onslaught of a quick series of ads that have nothing to do with each other, suffer a dire spiritual product—stagnation. They sit on the couch in a stupor, they eat and drink, and alarms are sounded through the nation. Our children are becoming obese.
What, then, is to be done? These six words falter before problems that are comparable to the impasse that visited my old dead friend. We have an economy that is stimulated by TV advertising. Yet the constant interruption of concentration it generates not only dominates much of our lives, but over the long run also is bound to bleed into our prosperity. The rest of the world is getting into position to do far better than us with future economic conditions.
If we want to have the best of all possible worlds, we had better recognize that we cannot have all the worlds. I believe that television commercials have got to go. Let us pay directly for what we enjoy on television rather than pass the spiritual cost on to our children and their children.
07-27-05, 09:31 AM
#4
DVD Talk Hero
I'm all for this, actually. I'd much rather pay a monthly fee for commercial-free broadcast television.
Commercials and intrusive advertising methods are going to get worse and worse. Eventually, I'm sure we'll be looking at a screen where 1/2 is the show and 1/2 is product ads, banners, scrolling text and other garbage.
Commercials and intrusive advertising methods are going to get worse and worse. Eventually, I'm sure we'll be looking at a screen where 1/2 is the show and 1/2 is product ads, banners, scrolling text and other garbage.
