TV Kids

A study released by the Kaiser Family Foundation and the Princeton Research Group discloses that American children under 6 spend more time in front of electronic "screen" media than they do reading or being read to. More than hearing books read to them or reading books themselves, the survey found most kids are playing video games, watching TV, or using a computer.

NPH readers may wonder, "so what?"

That's what the Vice President of Programming for the Cartoon Network, Alice Cahn, would like you to ask. She responds to the survey by positing that, "TV can be a trustworthy babysitter for children."

Yikes.

In response, a well-known psychology and pediatrics professor at GW Medical School emphasizes that, especially for kids 3 and under, any "screen time" is bad: "Experience wires the braind and forms the mind," he says, "not genes."

So we are raising up a generation of young people whose brains are wired by more and more experience with electronic screen media and less and less experience with print media and auditory story telling.

NPH is not a parent (he's a lackluster uncle and cousin, at best), so he can't criticize parents who use the TV as a babysitter with any moral authority. But this research is damning. And one aspect of TV viewership by children not addressed by early coverage of the report is advertising; pretty much every avenue of screen media has been permeated by advertising, so kids who spend a lot of time consuming TV, video games, and computers are taking in gads of advertising messages, many of which are masked to conceal their coersive character.

My wife and I are this close to putting the TV in the closet and cancelling our Netflix subscription; this report only makes it easier.

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Rushkoff on Idol: They Both Suck

NPH missed the Idol final last night because he was at a preschool graduation. Instead of listening to 40 29 year old Taylor Hicks sing his victory ballad, I was listening to about 25 preschoolers christening their own victory with a rousing rendition of "Jo-Jo-Joseph Had A Rainbow Coat."

But NPH favorite media analyst, Douglas Rushkoff, watched it. It's the first piece of the reality franchise he's watched all year, and he's convinced that the same fatigue effect that causes high school theater teachers to, after months of rehearsals, think their pubescent performers are actually good is clearly at work in who wins American Idol. I tend to agree.

I didn't watch much this season. I saw some of the audition episodes, where Chris Daughtry sang the knobs off my TV. Seriously, if Idol picked its winner after that initial stage of auditions instead of dragging us through four months of weekly performances by these people, the best singers would actually win.

Instead, what happens is that people with a gimmick endear themselves to millions of 14 year old girls, so they get trotted out there week after week, doing the same thing over and over again. And the audience, after awhile, is less offended by its poor quality each time it sees it.

Rushkoff's verdict? "Consuming bad media degrades our ability to perceive."

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What'd She Say--er Sell? A Rejoinder

One more thing: the moms tabbed by P&G to talk up their stuff are all women with extensive social networks. From the Business Week story:

"P&G concentrates
on finding women who have large social networks. Vocalpoint moms, who
range in age from 28 to 45, generally speak to about 25 to 30 other
women during the day, where an average mom speaks to just five."

Any civics junkie with her salt will immediately hear echoes of Robert Putnam here, the Harvard sociologist who has done his darndest to make civic involvement cool again. One of Putnam's main Theses is that people's social connections, their circle of friends with whom they associate and socialize, is a major indicator of their civic involvement. In other words, the more friends you have (or, at least, the more people you're friendly with), the more vital you are to the civic fabric of your community. Because how do people find out what's going on in their community? Mostly through the people who know what's going on and who then tell their friends.

Well, Vocalpoint is nothing else if it isn't this same principle applied to marketing. So my question is: why does this kind of thing only have appeal to people in the private sphere? Is it because they reap a material benefit, rather than a community one, one that is less easy to measure?

Why don't we recruit 600,000 people to go to city council meetings or organize neighborhood block parties? Anyone?

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What'd She Say--er, Sell?

The Center for Media and Democracy has a piece today on Proctor and Gamble's new stealth word-of-mouth marketing initiative, called Vocalpoint.

P&G has enrolled over 600,000 mothers (the biggest block of P&G consumers) to pitch their products to the people in their social networks--without disclosing their affiliation with the company.

What does this mean? NPH thinks it means the commodification of conversation; small-talk is a commodity useful for pitching products.

Be wary of any coupon-wielding soccer moms you may encounter. Be very wary.

Here's the link to the full Business Week story.

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Idol Trends

Tonight is the American Idol final. NPH is not a big Idol fanatic, but he is interested in the sociology of the thing. He can name for you the previous four winners (and finalists), and he does a mean Simon Cowell impression.

This is the fifth Idol finale, and NPH is curious about the public's perception of the racial makeup of past winners and finalists; NPH notices and ruminates on such things as these, but does anyone else? A few salient figures:

• The fifth final marks the four-and-a-halfth time that a white person has been in the final (Justin Guarini, the inagural runner-up was half-white and half-black)
• This is the third-and-a-halfth (again, Guarini) out of five years in which a white male has been in the final.
• This final is the fourth out of five years in which a white female has been in the final
• There has only been two-and-a-half (need I explain?) African American finalists (Guarini, Ruben Studdard, and Fantasia Barrino)
• Two of the two-and-a-half African American finalists won the competition
• If Kelly wins tonight, she will become the third white female to win
• If Taylor prevails, he will become the first--yes, the first--white male to win American Idol.
• Never has there been a non-white or non-African-American finalist.

Do with that information what you will, dear reader.

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Raze The Roof

When Jackson County (MO) voters failed to approve a tax increase measure that would fund the construction of a rolling roof over Arrowhead and Kauffman stadiums, few people believed that they'd seen the proposal for the last time. People were almost certain that it would be on the August ballot again.

Well, breathe a sigh of relief, opponents; it's dead until at least November.

NPH is glad. Maybe the extra three months will give Chiefs and Royals ownership some time to search the couch cushions for the spare change needed to pay for the thing. That way the taxpayers won't be asked to bankroll an amenity that, financially, will almost certainly benefit team owners more than the metro area itself.

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Free Health Care

NPH is a medical spouse, the low-glamour end of the dynamic marriage of a doctor and a minister (doctor T.V. shows abound, while minister T.V. shows get cancelled after a few episodes--read: "Life of Daniel").

As such, NPH hears a lot from his wife about the free medical services doled out by the hospitals in which she works in the center of this Heartland city. And now she has evidence.

"[The center-city's] two busy hospitals delivered more than half the
charity care provided by . . .area hospitals. No other hospital
came close to matching the $38 million in care [center city hospital] gave without
charge to poor, uninsured patients. [The hospitals] also wrote off $7 million in
bad debt."

That's from a Star piece about charity health care as depicted by a recent report of the Missouri Hospital Association. The story continues:

"The traditional categories used to measure a hospital’s benefits to the
community are charity care provided with no anticipation that patients
will be able to pay, and bad debt, the unpaid bills hospitals have
given up trying to collect. Together, these categories make up a
hospital’s uncompensated care.

'We are looking more broadly than a charity care or uncompensated care
report,' Becker said. 'We’re looking at the broad range of benefits
hospitals make to their communities.'"

By those "more broad" measurements, those two central city hospitals actually lag behind other urban hospitals in this area when it comes to charity care.

Charity care, the MHA wants to argue, is about more than care for the uninsured and written-off debt. But the center city hospital's president argues, "I think people go where they feel welcome and they're treated with dignity and services are available."

Treated with dignity? That gets harder and harder as the load of uninsured people needing health care gets heavier and heavier. Because almost all of that weight is felt in the central part of the metro area, and not out in the sprawling suburbs, where all of the new hospitals and home developments are being built.

NPH can't avoid the irony that the word "hospital" comes from the same root as "hospitality," and that a hospital's ability to treat people with "dignity" is now a measurement of its charity. Dignity is what the invention of the hospital was all about.

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