Quote and Fact of the day

Living rooms, family rooms, dens, and bedrooms across America have become television’s temples. Typically, the furniture is arranged so every seat in the house affords a view of the tube. And every day parents, kids, and teenagers across America gather in their family and individual tamples, together and alone, to watch the electronic god. Studies have shown program content is not the principal factor in assembling an audience for television. We just go in and turn it on when no other activity is preferable, obligatory, or necessary.

• The average household in America has the television on for 8 hours and 11 minutes a day
• The average amount of television watched daily by 8-18 year olds is just under 4 hours
• The younger the child, the more television they watch
• 8-10: 4 hours 10 minutes
• 11-14: 4 hours 2 minutes
• 15-18: 3 hours 20 minutes
• It is estimated American children ages 6 and under watch about 2 hours of television a day
• The average college student watches 24.3 hours of television a week.
• The average American female watches 4 hours 40 minutes a day
• The average American male watches 4 hours 2 minutes a day
  

This means that young children who are unable to distinguish fact from fantasy will have spent thousands of hours watching television before they begin their formal schooling. Over the course of a year, the average child will spend 900 hours in school, and almost 1,023 hours in front of the television.

We have become as Quentin Schultze has suggested, a nation of "grazing videots." Like cattle eating grass in a pasture, we sit comfortably in our chairs flicking the remote and satisfying our televisual hunger with hour upon hour of TV's fare.

-Walt Mueller: Youth Culture 101

I did my own calculations and found that the Average American will spend 71 days straight of the year in front of the television, which is 20% of the year! One fifth of our time is spent watching television!