The latest "hot, hot, hot" study on the unhealthy effects of media introduced in the previous blog, also reports other correlates of heavy media use such as smoking, poor grades in school, earlier onset of sexual behavior, and, lest we forget, anti-social or aggressive behavior.
"I think we were pretty surprised by how overwhelming the number of studies was that showed this negative health impact," said Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel of the National Institutes of Health, and lead researcher on the study. But how can that be? This research arena on "bad media effects" has been up and running for 50 years.
Never mind! Look, the trouble with all these "correlational" or even "causal" or experimental studies is that they typically fail to note that ordinarily there is something called a threshhold effect in these data. That is, it is only when time doing "TV" or "movies" or "music" or "Internet" gets beyond a certain number of hours do problems emerge. Use of these media up to, say, 3-5 hours a day, generally does not negatively correlate with poor grades in school or poor reading skills. In other words, we're talking about serious excess. How many hours per day or per week do you SIT in front of some screen and only get up to eat, drink, or evacuate?
What, you might ask, also correlates with excessive amounts of media use (or abuse) beside obesity? Well, I'll tell you: absentee parenting, latch key children, too many children for ill-equipped parents to handle, poverty, single parent households, parents who are afraid to refuse anything a child asks or screams or badgers for. Parents who are otherwise engaged, generally too preoccupied with their own needs, interests, goals, etc. to parent and use credit cards as a substitute for "quality time," add to the large list of contributions. Need I continue?
Oh, yes, acne, early onset diabetes, hemorrhoids, malnutrition, vitamin D deficiency all correlate with high media use; as will auto-immune deficiencies. Why? Because they're all correlated with junk food consumption or other bad diets and with lack of sunlight and exercise. What's also been found related to cancer? Auto-immune deficiencies. You see where this goes?
Peer Groups and Cave Men
The reverse also applies: the more involved are parents, the less media overdose there is as well as the fewer other "bad behaviors" are likely to be there. Yes, people who watch a lot of sexy media programming are likely to have sex earlier. Right? Not necessrily. People who are already interested in sex, from peer influences primarily, are more likely to watch sexualized media, more likely to engage in early sex. Do you really think that someone would watch a golf show on cable if they weren't already interested in golf? Same for smoking.
Few kids readily stand up to peer pressure. (I know, you all did, but I'm talking about the rest of your peer group, you know, the weak ones.) and where the peer group goes, so do most of the "not sures" and "what do you guys think?" types. The more otherwise engaged parents or older siblings, the more the peer group rules. Not just in the U.S.; in most Westernized countries.
Which is the most politically sensitive factor to rail against, the media or the parents? Again, the news headlines which tout these latest results (results which are really a collection of old studies) suggest it's the media that's the danger: The media (collective noun) is a sorcerer, a beguiling agent which ensnares people and pushes them into unhealthy habits and life styles. The same media could have noted, of course, that, given the opportunity, ordinary people would rather choose easy, comfortable, high calorie, low exertion activities than the opposite.
The media didn't create the desire to eat and sloth about. Its principal guilt is largely that, in its various forms, it enables these predelections which are,themeselves, vestigial tendencies from our remote ancestors and their uncertain food sources when we really had to work for our food and lights went out at around sundown. Today, we don't work for our food, we pay for it. Today we have time to kill and little need to burn calories. It's not the media. It's people. Remember the movie, Soylent Green?" Remember the horrific revelation and the hushed cry, "Soylent Green is people"? Whether it's media or cannibalism, it's almost always primarily about people and, in this context, only secondarily about the media.
Parents Are Not Pillars
There's a recurring formula operating in this study and news stories about it. Studies report the expected results and then, typically and quite properly, suggest, even adivse parents to pay attention to and discourage so many hours spent in passive or sedentary acitivies in their children's routines. Parents are advised to encourage their children and to eat less "bad" food and eat less food. All well and good. BUT, the trouble is, these parents are often the ones who are role modeling this diabetes-prone behavior. Who is going to tell the parents to change their ways-especially when the parents hang with other sedenatary adults? Hang out one day at one of the all-you-can-eat family restaurant chains like Golden Corral. See the parents and children. See obesity role modeling in action, live, on the hoof.
Further, child development as far back as Piaget's work showed that when parents tell children to do the "right" thing, or the "healthy" thing, but don't do it themselves, they produce far less compliance with these requests than when parents do as they say. In other words, children see hypocricy in their parents and go for the Cheese Whiz.
No More Media Studies Needed on Unhealthy Lifestyles
Lest we forget, one most important point: When will grant funding agencies and universities or house these researchers finally say, "Enough already. We understand contributing factors to health and behavioral problems. Let's, instead, do research on finding solutions to people's resistance to this information. This is not just a poverty issue. It's an attitude issue. It's a "pill will cure everything" attitude issue. It's an availability issue. We need effective educational and behavioral strategies to address these problems, to increase exercise, reduce calory intake, discourage comfort-food eating. We need to place limits on the number of fast food restaurants in neighborhoods like some municipalities do for bars so it's less easy to just eat "fast junk."
We need strategies developed to get people out of the chairs and into the parks or someplace where they "do" rather than eat." Maybe we need to "monetize" attitude and behavior change. Recent research reports that paying people to lose weight, to do exercise, works well. The greater trick, though, is to get them to internalize these healthier attitudes and choice behaviors sot that feeling good is the incentive, not money The goal must be to sensitize people to how good it feels to feel healthy rather than accept the steady state of feeling "just okay." And while we're at it, we need to get them to experience the simple joys of reducing life spent online, wired, constantly "on," continuously "connected."
These are serious problems addressed in this study but they are not media problems. They're life style problems of which the media is just one component. We must stop looking for scapegoats to explain our culture's dysfunctionality and start looking in the mirror. How many of the researchers on this study are overweight because they spend too much time indulging their videophilia in the research lab?
Links:
The Media Psychology Blog
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