Television and the Forever Changing World

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Television and the Forever Changing World

“To suggest that children growing up in the 1990s live in a different world than the one their parents or grandparents experienced is not only to state the obvious, but to understate the obvious.”

-Children & Television: Images in Changing a Sociocultural World

- Joy Keiko Asamen and Gordon L. Berry, Eds.

From Barney the Purple Dinosaur and Sesame Street to Friends and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, television covers a variety of materials. The television, as a means of education, has changed drastically since its 1939 North American debut. The way children learn, both academically and socially, have been affected by this change. Television is at the center of a multimedia society. Effects of television on children include, among many other aspects of life, time control and leisure activity displacement, parental involvement in education, and attention, comprehension, and retention skills.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF TELEVISION

At the time of its debut, the television was expected to impact the lives of children. TV broadcasting came to the United States in July of 1941, when the Federal Communications Commission licensed the first commercial stations. Broadcasting was then limited during World War 2, and once again went full-scale in 1946. “Despite the slow start to television broadcasting, this medium was quickly adopted and it diffused through the population at an accelerated pace (Asamen 10).” The number of households with a television set jumped from approximately 10,000 in 1945 to nearly seven million in 1950. “By 1955, almost 65% of U.S. households had at least one television set, and that figure was 90% in 1960 (Asamen 11).” Currently only 2% of American households do not have a television set. (Asamen 10-11)

Throughout the past three or four decades, the image of an American family has become more complex. In the past, families predominantly consisted of a mother, a father, and several children. This has developed into something new, with "a highly varied collection of nuclear families with one or two children, single parent households (predominantly female-headed), reconstituted or blended families following divorce and remarriage, and married or unmarried couples who prefer to remain childless (Huston 36)." This observation causes a person o ask whether or not television programming has reflected this change. Are shows like 7th Heaven an accurate representation of a modern American family? Are the contents of The Wonder Years and The Brady bunch still relevant in our society?

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