American television viewing climbed again last season to a record household average of eight hours, 11 minutes a day, Nielsen Media Research has found.
The latest finding challenges perceptions that Americans are watching less TV. . . .
[T]he average individual watched four hours and 32 minutes of television a day last season, the highest level in 15 years. The figures include in-home viewing levels for broadcast, cable and satellite television during all parts of the day.
Nielsen and other industry experts attributed the upward trend to the growing number of television sets in homes and an explosion in the number of channels.
The average US home now receives more than 100 channels of programming.
Link.
This is a good opportunity to re-produce my Marshall McLuhan Top 10:
10. “The specialist is one who never makes small mistakes while moving toward the grand fallacy.”
9. “One of McLuhan's great theories was that all the university taught you to do was bullshit. And he thought that bullshit was a very high order of thought.”
8. “Technical change alters not only habits of life, but patterns of thought and valuation.”
7. “Any community that wants to maximize the exchange of goods has simply got to homogenize social life.”
6. “Tradition, in a word, is the sense of the total past as now.”
5. “I find most pop culture monstrous and sickening. I study it for my own survival.”
4. “The problem is not that Johnny can't read, but that Johnny can't visualize distant goals.”
3. “As a grandparent, McLuhan advised his son Eric to limit the time his young daughter spent watching TV: television, he wrote Eric, in language he permitted himself only in private, was a 'vile drug which permeates the nervous system, especially in the young.'”
2. “To resist TV, one must acquire the antidote of related media like print.”
1. “The present cannot be revealed to people until it has become yesterday.”
