Television, Addiction to

People throughout the industrialized world typically devote about 3 hours a day to watching television. In many societies, this easily constitutes half of all a person's leisure time or, calculated another way, 9 full years of a 75-year life span. Nine years is even more remarkable if we consider that we sleep roughly one third of the life span and are therefore only left with 50 waking years not watching TV.

The term addiction has been extended to a whole host of nondrug behaviors, from gambling and sexuality to video gaming, television viewing, and Internet use. Some experts define addiction as biological dependence on a substance. If the addicted person no longer ingests the substance, he or she may experience unpleasant and often disorienting biological withdrawal symptoms. In this sense, applying the term addiction term to the use of electronic media or even gambling and sexual activity may be both wrong and misleading.

Others would argue that because all pleasurable experiences have a biological component, the traditional notions of biological addiction could still apply to sex, gambling, television viewing, or Internet use—even though with no substance involved—if a person becomes extremely dependent on that form of pleasure and feels horrible if no longer engaged in the behavior. This entry, however, focuses on television [Page 799]addiction as a dependence on television that is not defined in part as biological dependence.

Even apart from biological factors, however, television viewing can be self-perpetuating and can produce psychological dependency that is of considerable significance. Furthermore, heavy and prolonged viewing go hand in hand with television dependence, and a considerable range of effects, from obesity to foreshortened attention span, have been hypothesized or shown to result from heavy and prolonged viewing. Thus, understanding how television dependence develops and is reinforced is of real import.

Most people believe television viewing can be addictive. North American surveys have found that roughly 10% of adults believe that they are addicted, but 65% to 70% report believing that others are addicted. And many millions experience misgivings about how much they view. In a 1990 Gallup poll, 42% of adult Americans reported believing that they spent “too much time watching television.”

Part of what holds people's attention to television is the “orienting response.” First described by Ivan Pavlov in 1927, the orienting response is an instinctive visual (or auditory) reaction to any sudden or novel stimulus in the environment. Byron Reeves of Stanford University and Esther Thorson at the University of Missouri and their colleagues first used the EEG in 1985 to test whether the simple formal features of television (cuts, edits, zooms, pans, sudden noises, and so on) might activate the orienting response, thereby causing attention to be drawn to the screen. Reeves and Thorson and their team concluded that the formal features of cuts, edits, and movement did indeed command involuntary responses, which may have developed as a result of the evolutionary importance of detecting movement. They noted that it is the form rather than the content of television that is unique.

Music videos and other forms of advertising that frequently use rapid intercutting are thus particularly apt to hold attention. The orienting response may best explain typical viewer reports such as, “If a television is on, I just can't keep my eyes off it,” “I don't want to watch as much as I do but I can't help it. It makes me watch it,” and “I feel hypnotized when I watch television.”

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