Mind and Media: The Effects of Television, Video Games, and Computers

By Patricia Marks Greenfield

Book Overview

Video games, television, and computers are facts of life for today's children. Anxious parents and teachers, concerned with maintaining the intellectual and social richness of childhood, need to understand their effects. Are we producing a generation of passive children who can't read, who require constant visual and aural stimulation, and who prefer the company of technical instruments to friends and family? Greenfield believes that to answer this question we should not cling to old and elitist assumptions about the value of literacy. Instead she urges that we explore the results of the new research to discover how the various media can be used to promote social growth and thinking skills. She finds that each medium can make a contribution to development, that each has strengths and weaknesses, and that the ideal childhood environment includes a multimedia approach to learning. Current studies show us, for example, that television may indeed hinder reading ability under some circumstances. Yet it may also be used to enhance and motivate reading. Television can foster visual literacy, teaching children how to interpret close-ups, zooms, and cutting, and beyond this, how to pick up visual details, orient oneself in space, and anticipate formats and patterns of behavior. Video games teach spatial skills and inductive thinking, and classroom computers, contrary to the popular stereotype, encourage cooperative enterprise. Timely and optimistic, Mind and Media is filled with unexpected conclusions and practical suggestions for helping our children to thrive in a technological world.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0674576209
• ISBN13: 9780674576209
• Release Date: March 1984
• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Length: 210 Pages
• Weight: 1.05 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.8" x 8.6"

Customer Reviews

Insightful works on the effect of the media onto our minds

I like this book very much, and believe that it should deserve much more attention. This book eloquently discusses the effect of television, video game and radio onto our minds. Even today, many people still naively assert that viewing television is bad while reading books is good. This book attempts to go deeper into the matter. It reports such interesting research as comparing the effect of television and radio, with two groups of children each hear or view a story from the radio or television. When the children were required to retell the story, it was found that those viewing the story tend to use more pronounce, such as "he" and "she", with a lot of gestures than those hearing the story. It is believed that these pronounce actually refer to the visual images in the minds of those children watching the story. This can clearly be related to today problem of our children, who grew up with the television, of the difficulty in expressing themselves. Another interesting report investigates imagination as affected by different media. Again two groups of children each hear or view a story from the radio or television. The playing of the story was stopped in the middle before its end. The children were required to continue and finish the story. Children hearing the story are found to be more imaginative and creative in terms of the novel elements in their ways of completing the story. The result clearly indicates that the radio often leaves more space for the hearers to fill in. As a whole, this book gives much insight into the matter, particularly on the implications to educating our children in how to view these different media. If the above sounds interesting to you, I will strongly recommend this book to you.