Is TV evil? I don't watch a lot of TV myself, which might make me unqualified to comment on this, but I suspect the answer is yes. Here's why:

• Unceasing violence on the tube. I confess to being uneasy at agreeing with the Christian right about this, but the constant and graphic violence on TV just has to have an effect on society at large. Of course, the arrow of causality goes both ways, but if advertising has an effect on people (and Procter & Gamble bets a billion dollars a year that it does) then it's hard to argue that the shows themselves don't. What's more, it's a vicious circle as TV shows vie to outdo each other every year because audiences become jaded so quickly. Remember when Hill Street Blues seemed awfully violent?

• Attention span. It seems pretty clear that attention spans have decreased in children over the last 30 years or so, and TV is the most commonly blamed culprit. It makes perfect sense, too: if you grow up watching six or seven hours of TV a day, and it's always broken up into 12-minutes chunks, you're going to slowly become conditioned to getting antsy after doing any single thing for 12 minutes or more. My mother, a former fourth grade teacher, offers as anecdotal evidence the fact that when she started teaching fourth grade in 1970 she knew that she couldn't schedule an activity to last any longer than 30 minutes or so because the kids would start getting too restless. By the time she retired earlier this year, she claims that 15 minutes was the limit.

• TV's hypnotic effect. OK, this is highly subjective, but TV seems to be somehow addictive in a way that books or radio aren't. Is it the flickering screen? The constant hum? I don't know. But it sure seems like there are a lot of people who feel vaguely uncomfortable unless the TV is on in the background, almost the same way a smoker feels if there are no cigarettes handy. Anecdotally, the thing that's really convinced me about this is watching kids react to TV. Take a wild, rampaging two-year old and plunk him down in front of the TV, and within minutes he's staring at the screen and won't budge for an hour, far longer than you could engage his attention for any other activity.

Of course, this all begs the question of whether TV is really any different from other mediums. After all, tabloid newspapers have lots of violence, the Web rewards short attention spans, and movies can be hypnotic. What's more, you can even argue that the effects aren't all bad. A short attention span, for example, is just the flip side of being able to switch tasks frequently and quickly, a valuable skill in a fast moving world. Still, TV is far more pervasive than the other mediums, and it's hard to really make a cogent argument that we should be actively trying to shorten our children's attention spans.

I imagine that somewhere there's a limit to just how violent TV (and movies) can get, which might make this particular problem self-correcting, but the other two issues seem far more insidious to me. The attention span encouraged by TV gets shorter and shorter (30 minutes in the 50s vs. 15 minutes in the 70s vs. 3 or 4 minutes today) and its hypnotic effect ensures that everyone stays hooked. Our view of the world therefore gets shallower and shallower, sound bites get shorter, and nothing is important unless it can be understood in 30 seconds or less. Does this mean that the world is becoming a worse place, or merely a different one? Only time will tell, but I guess my vote is obvious....

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