Addicted to the Tube

Is television addictive?

The Tube, a new documentary film by Peter Entell, raises significant issues about the physiological dangers of TV and computer screen viewing. It gives its evidence in a roundabout, self-contradictory way, showing hints of paranoid hysteria in the journalistic search for a scientific answer. Yet, it thus indicates psychological as well as physical reasons for the many hours we spend each day glued to TV and computer screens.

Initially, The Tube presents the Swiss TV journalist, Luc Mariot, becoming concerned when his 4-year-old daughter stares obsessively at the TV screen at home and throws a temper tantrum when he decides to turn it off. Our intrepid hero then insists on creating a documentary about the problem, despite the cautions of colleagues at work that he might discover something that would undermine their own medium.

Despite such a dramatic beginning, The Tube meanders as it follows Luc's internet research, discussions with colleagues, and interviews with businessmen and professors, mixed with shots of people staring at their TV screens. For example, the documentary shows Luc putting an ad in the paper to find people willing to videotape themselves watching TV, and then shows the setting up of the video camera in one such home, just to get various shots of people staring at the screen, like his daughter. Occasionally, however, significant moments arise.

Luc investigates the 1997 incident of a Pokemon ("pocket monster") TV cartoon in Japan that sent 618 children to the hospital with seizures when they watched a five-second sequence of the lovable pet, Pikachu, with his eyes flashing wildly onscreen. Luc interviews a physician in Japan who discovered that the children were "hypersensitive to light." Watching TV produced "abnormal brainwaves" in them. "One in 4,000" people have this condition, the doctor says. For them, watching the flickering light of TV always entails some risk.

This idea of the TV (and computer) screen being dangerous to the viewer, no matter what the content, becomes the dominant theme in the documentary. However, the film itself belies such a claim—as its own content becomes dangerously tedious at times, provoking the viewer to turn off or fast-forward the videotape, rather than being hypnotized by its flickering light. The small and difficult to read subtitles became annoying, rather than mesmerizing, to this viewer as well.

Luc discovers that the Japanese are so concerned now about the content of the Pokemon TV cartoon that they send each episode through a "flicker machine," to test its safety, before broadcasting it on TV. (Episode #38, with Pikachu's flashing eyes, which caused the convulsions in Japan, was never shown in the U.S. for that reason.) A Japanese executive tells Luc that some shows on TV might have a soothing effect, producing "alpha waves" in the brain, whereas programs with intense flickering may have the opposite effect.

Luc researches the alpha-wave effect of TV watching and finds that these waves are normally produced in a relaxed brain, as when a subject (hooked up to an EEG machine) imagines being in a boat on a lake. But the alpha waves produced by TV are only relaxing while the viewer watches the set. When the screen is turned off, the opposite effect is reported: viewers feel "guilty, sluggish, sapped and lonely, rather than relaxed." The more they watch, the worse they feel. However, Luc reads this information from his computer screen, after an internet search—without showing the scientific sources or physiological research involved. Next, he visits a therapist in Massachusetts (Maressa Hecht Orzack, Ph.D.) who treats "internet addiction." She also admits her own symptoms of this disorder. But again, there is no documentation of such symptoms as being physiological effects of the CRT screen—just personal opinions and anecdotal evidence. According to Orzack, "the same drug" is used to treat computer and cocaine addictions. But this does not prove that the source of...