How come television make some smarter but some dumber?

I raise German Shepherds. From the time they are born till they are 16 weeks what ever happens to them forms the basis of what kind of dog they will be later. The fearful omes ( little chickens ) I go out of my way for and draw them out to make them feel safe. The real big brats I disipline more and make them submit more in a kind way. I roll them on their backs and expose their bellies and make them let me hold them down and give it up. I make sure that nothing happens bad to them during this time. I make sure they get lots of the right kind of attention and redirect the bad behavior and pay attention to the good behavior.

If they are chewing on somthing they are not supposed too I just pick them up without saying No or Bad and just put them down someplace else and get them doing somthing else. If they are too excited I ignore them until they are quiet little cuties and then I give them attention and love.

People should be the same way with small children. You ignore the bad behavior and praise the good behavior. Bad and good habits are formed when very young. Once its a bad habit its hard to break. People always tell me that aquire my puppies how great they are. Quiet and confident and attentive. They do not how to be that way on their own. Its a learned behavior plain and simple.

Humans are the same way. Balance is everything. If you spoil they want everything always. If your harsh they withdraw. If you beat them they learn to hate themselves and other people and don't trust.

Parents whom park their children in front of the TV and other stimulis should be aware of what they are doing. TV is not the real world now is it. If thats all they know even at a young age it imprints them forever. Just like video games and being lied too by the adults whom rear them. Truth, love and kindness and disipline,respect are important.

Childrens programs. Some are great and some are trash. Some teach and some have nothing to offer other than entertainment. Would you rather have your kids learn or be entertained. They say that we all formulate whom we are and what we think by the time were 4 years old. So to everybody out there make it count. Feed their minds trash and get trash back. Educate your children young with positive reinforcment and get a well rounded child. You are what you eat. You are what you learn. You are what you do. You are what you think.

TV doesn't make anybody smarter or dumber, ever. Intelligence is an inherent ability, you have what you have.

For the most part native intelligence isn't the necessary discriminator to success. Strength of will and confidence are just as important as intelligence.

TV can be a tool to educate, if used that way. That would make you more knowledgable. However, theres no profit in that so its a dying niche. Even the supposed commercial educational channels are really Reality TV channels now. Its only PBS and the BBC that really still educates and those probably wont last much longer.

TV has 2 purposes in modern society:

-Keep you occupied when you aren't working. With time on your hands you might consider how the world works.
-Convince you to spend more than you can afford to buy stuff you don't actually need.

Debt pusher and pacifier in one.

reply to post by FreshAirGirl


The long, lost art of disciplining.
Unfortunately, tough love is now deemed offensive to so many people here, all because of political correctness.
The problem is a lot of people feel that the upbringing of a child should fall on schools and teachers.

...btw,

Those who are AWARE of the subliminal messages do not become affected. This is because subliminals are perceived by the subconscious. However, once you become CONSCIOUS of what the subliminals are, and once you become aware of all the symbols shown on TV and anywhere for that matter, it no longer affects you.

People who are not aware of these things become controlled by them.

reply to post by macchoi


Exactly! And controlled by them to a point where it becomes reality to them. I am a first hand witness of this. Kids now a days are all sucked into their favorite tv shows and video games that they become unaware of these things and it eventually takes their life over by changing their prespective on things and making what happend on tv and video games normal to them. You wouldnt beleive all the ignorant mided kids im around everyday, it drives me crazy to hear some of there conversations and thoughts

America wrote the book on propaganda - Edward Bernays wrote it back in 1928:



www.historyisaweapon.com...

THE conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.

We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society.

Our invisible governors are, in many cases, unaware of the identity of their fellow members in the inner cabinet.

They govern us by their qualities of natural leadership, their ability to supply needed ideas and by their key position in the social structure. Whatever attitude one chooses to take toward this condition, it remains a fact that in almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons—a trifling fraction of our hundred and twenty million—who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind, who harness old social forces and contrive new ways to bind and guide the world.

It is not usually realized how necessary these invisible governors are to the orderly functioning of our group life. In theory, every citizen may vote for whom he pleases. Our Constitution does not envisage political parties as part of the mechanism of government, and its framers seem not to have pictured to themselves the existence in our national politics of anything like the modern political machine. But the American voters soon found that without organization and direction their individual votes, cast, perhaps, for dozens or hundreds of candidates, would produce nothing but confusion. Invisible government, in the shape of rudimentary political parties, arose almost overnight. Ever since then we have agreed, for the sake of simplicity and practicality, that party machines should narrow down the field of choice to two candidates, or at most three or four.

In theory, every citizen makes up his mind on public questions and matters of private conduct. In practice, if all men had to study for themselves the abstruse economic, political, and ethical data involved in every question, they would find it impossible to come to a conclusion about anything. We have voluntarily agreed to let an invisible government sift the data and high-spot the outstanding issues so that our field of choice shall be narrowed to practical proportions. From our leaders and the media they use to reach the public, we accept the evidence and the demarcation of issues bearing upon public questions; from some ethical teacher, be it a minister, a favorite essayist, or merely prevailing opinion, we accept a standardized code of social conduct to which we conform most of the time.

This was long before the advent of television. WWI had proved just how powerful propaganda was, and in fact it was the lessons learned by losing WWI that prompted the NAZIs to emulate American propaganda. Americans appealed to emotion, rather than reason:

“Hitler learned to admire American propaganda through a young American expatriate who described to him, in glowing detail, how Americans enjoyed the atmosphere at football games. This American expatriate, with the memorable name of Ernst "Putzi" Hanfstängl, told the Führer how Americans could be whipped up into a frenzy through blaring music, group cheers, and chants against the enemy.”

www.purewatergazette.net...


Television is pure propaganda, it is a one-way conversation that tells us how to behave, tells us what we want and tells us how to get it - by competing with our peers and working meaningless jobs. Turn off all the media to know what your own thoughts are - otherwise you're just repeating what you're told.

Images on T.V. evoke emotions, with fear being the most-desired:

“Campaigns with purely emotional content performed about twice as well (31% vs. 16%) with only rational content, and those that were purely emotional did a little better (31% vs 26%) those that mixed emotional and rational content.”

www.neurosciencemarketing.com...

Turn it off and keep it off - when you do you'll stop being so fearful of missing a sale, or of being blown up in a terrorist attack, or of being robbed by a black man.

Yeah it all is based on the individual,

I have countless bits of pop-culture trivia in my head thanks to TV, but it's more than that, I watch documentaries and my mind automatically memorizes facts here and there, and I can recall them 10 years later, which causes some people to call me a liar, it makes me laugh, when you know an obscure fact it angers some people, even when they brought the subject up.

Some people simply see the most basic surface of a movie, some people will watch The Shining by Kubrick and you could ask them for hours on end, their answer would be it was a 'scary movie', they would describe the basic plot to you but they would just simply not pick up on any of the deeper elements, cinematic achievements, horror-genre firsts, symbolic messages. Some simply can't see a symbolic image for more than the 1 clear image on the most basic surface.

I suppose someone could learn to see things in a different way by studying symbolism, that alone is a method they could train their mind to look deeper than the surface, and if they aren't good at memorizing facts, they might at least see deep into the soul of the script-writer and see what a horrible show it is they are watching, or how twisted the writers are. You can pick up on the decade a script-writer grew up in by paying attention to the jokes in a sitcom, but of course you can pick up the 'symbolic' messages behind this and that, it's true, some shows have no deep meaning and are only good for a cheap laugh.

Originally posted by FraternitasSaturni
who said we're created equal?

Good point.
True too.
Nobody. No two people on earth are or ever have been equal.

That hasn't stopped society from working really hard to make people equally stupid though.

TV is a great IQ reducer.