Influence of Television on the Young

Television is now the major influence upon children's lives, surpassing the oral environment of tradition and the literary environment of post-traditional culture. The above quote by one of the early chairmen of the board of National Educational Television was made in 1979: a period when movie marquees still proclaimed "Fight Pay TV," when the initials "VCR" meant nothing, and when anyone living fifty miles outside of a major metropolitan area considered themselves fortunate if they could receive three television stations without static. Needless to say, videocassette recorders, cable and satellite dishes have inundated the American child with television images in the mere fourteen years since then (Henry 3). If, as Norman Cousins posits, television was the principal chalk slate in the classroom of children's minds before, it is safe to say that the slate has since expanded a thousand times to enormous blackboard size. Whether those were halcyon days or not is a question to be debated among nostalgics, historians and cultural anthropologists; in today's reality the images are changing too fast for "the hurried child" to catch a breath and consider (Elkind 71).

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t that runs deeper than the cultural trappings of either the ascendant civilization they are joining or the declining civilization they are abandoning. He ascribes an element of that universal appeal to the myth underlying the dominant civilization. Members of a civilization are participants, in part, because they vicariously share the mythic core of the civilization. It has been noted throughout history often enough that the "civilization" and "culture" associated with an era and a region are often the domain of the upper class, a reflection of the divisions wrought by a cultural environment transmitted via the written word to the upper classes, while the supportive lower classes retained an oppressed oral tribal culture. Indeed, Karl Marx' "international proletariat" theory is contingent upon belief in a transnational cultural environment binding the lower classes together. The advent of television (and particularly cartoon programming aimed at children) works to supplant the oppressed oral cultural environment with a supported visual one - on a truly international scale. Mimesis, or imitation, is described by Toynbee as an important element in the accumulation of a shared cultural value system (161-166); given the prima
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 2479
Approximate Pages = 10 (250 words per page)

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