Squarely in the midst of the ‘is television mind control' discussion is my very favorite medical emergency of the past 50 years.
In 1997, 700 Japanese kids had near simultaneous epileptic seizures. And those were just the ones who were rushed to hospitals-so those are the only ones we heard about.
Really, it could have been thousands.
Japan's version of the CDC went crazy. Seven hundred kids, simultaneous seizures, no clues. So weird it almost seems like television.
Turns out it was television-or sort of. The reason for the seizures was later to be determined to be a program that aired an amped-up version of Pokemon. The crazy flashing lights is what did those kids in.
And the power to induce changes in the brain that severe-yup, that's what's coming out of the box in our living rooms.
University of Chicago psychologist Mihaly Csikszsentmihalyi and Rutgers University director of media studies Robert Kubey also figured this out when they used EEG technology to monitor brain waves during TV viewing.
What they discovered is that TV viewing effectively acts like a narcotic-inducing both relaxation and passivity. If viewing continues this leads to drowsiness which later becomes depression which gives way to further reasons not to leave the couch.
This is what we call "the cycle of addiction."
But there is something of a difference (though often hard to detect) between addiction and mind-control.
One is a choice, a difficult one perhaps, but a choice. The other, especially in its most effective form, removes the possibility of that opportunity before we even notice.
This brings me once again to sports-or, sports journalists at least. Bill Simmons, the wry ESPN columnist, recently wrote a piece on erroneous sport's predictions-it was sort of a over-the-top lifetime anti-achievement review.
About two pages long and packed with media references. He goes from "The Longest Yard" to Ryan Seacrest faster than you can say Alfred Hitchcock-which he also says.
There are a long couple of graphs devoted to his watching of the four-part Karate Kid marathon, in between watching playoff football. There are video games references and commercial references and Tony Bennet references.
The whole piece is one giant admission that this guy does almost nothing but watch TV. And that's on top of all the other TV he has to watch simply to be a sportswriter-which, as a sportswriter, I can tell you is considerably more than physically possible.
And Simmons isn't alone. Tune into almost any sports radio show and they're filled with TV talk. Same thing with their television cohorts. Sports journalism has become de-facto advertisement for the rest for television, a shame since the thing that makes sports so wonderful is they're one of the only forms of spontaneous entertainment left.
Also, because sports is an on-going conversation, people who love sports also love listening to people talk about sports. And the people who talk about sports are also talking about how their lives are built out of television-which is fine way of giving the rest of us permission to do nothing but watch television.
It's really the most effective kind of propaganda-the kind we want to hear. Not all that much different from McDonald's selling hamburgers to stoners.
And considering that TV is now considered a public health catastrophe, just about as unhealthy.
