Then abruptly, she stood stock still and swiveled her head toward a big television set at one end of the room, entranced by the image of a singing, swaying Baby Elmo.

“What’s happening is she’s being pulled away by the TV all the time, rather than making a behavioral decision to watch TV,” says Dan Anderson, a psychology professor who along with two Graduate students are observing Molly and her Mother through a two-way mirror.

The University of Massachusetts professor, studies heart rate, eye-tracking and an array of other measures to understand what happens when we watch television. On average, both adults and children look at and away from a TV set up to 150 times an hour. A phenomenon called “attentional inertia.”

When a show is either too fast and stimulating or too calm and slow, our attention slips away. Television attracts us because its content can challenge our cognition. But foremost, its quick cuts and rapid imagery are designed to keep tugging at our natural inclination to orient toward the shiny, the bright, the mobile, to whatever we find eye-catching in our environment. It’s ingenious: entertainment that hooks us by appealing to out very instincts for survival. This is why very young viewers like Molly are entertained by the plethora of new “educational” shows and DVDs aimed at them,even though they understand little and likely learn little from this fare. Push and pull,back and forth, television is in essence an interruption machine, the most powerful attention slicer yet invented.

Just step into the room with the enticing glow, and life changes.

This was the intriguing discovery that Anderson made while exploring the gaze of the tiniest watchers, the final frontier of TV viewership. In all the years that he and others sought to probe the question of how much we attend to television, no one thought to ask to how television changed off-screen life during an on-air moment. Anderson and his team recently discovered that television influences family life even when kids don’t seem to be watching. When a game show is on, children ages one to three play with toys for half the amount of time and show up to 25% less focus in their play than they do when the TV is off.

In other words they exhibit key characteristics- abbreviated and less focused play –of attention-deficient children. They begin to look like junior multi-taskers, moving from toy to toy, forgetting what they were doing when they were interrupted by an interesting snippet of the show. Not surprisingly, parents in turn are distracted,interacting 20% less with their kids and relating passively- “That’s nice dear” or: Don’t bother me, I’m watching TV”- when they do. Now consider that more than half the children ages eight to eighteen live in homes where TV is on most of the time.

Factor in the screens in the waiting rooms, airport, classroom, back-seat of the car. Then zoom out and remember that television is just one element in a daily deluge of screens that split our focus.

Wherever Molly’s gaze falls, whenever she turns, whomever she talks to, she’ll likely experience divided attention.

She being groomed for a multi-tasking, interrupt driven world.And she doesn’t need Elmo to teach her that.

Extract from, ‘Distracted’, The Erosion of Attention and the Coming of the Dark Age.By Maggie Jackson. Published by Prometheus Books

Hi, we’re the Pseudo Family Robinson from Overthehillandfaraway.

We started having our Switch Off ~ Tune In day every Wednesday about a month ago. Although our children, (and my husband) complained a lot to start with, now they enjoy it…. mostly. Our is daughter is 5 years old & our son is 8.

We make sure we’ve got a few things planned or at least on standby. (The kids come up with most of the ideas for ‘next week’s SOTI Day’ although we have had to reject, ‘Going to Disneyland’, twice!)

Some things we’ve done are; made cupcakes for school lunches, gone on a bike ride & to the park (usually weekend things) played some card & board games. We also dragged out a huge Jigsaw Puzzle and we work on that if anyone feels like it. Books make more of an appearance and homework gets done…mostly!

(I must be honest here and tell you that we have had a couple of tantrums about missing a favourite TV show.  But as I told my husband we can just record, ‘Big Men-Big Fish’ and he can watch it tomorrow!)

One night after dinner we lit the fire-pit on the deck, toasted marshmallows and played a progressive story game which was quite hilarious and a little bit scary, thanks to our five year olds’ vivid imagination.

My husband has finally started reading the book I got him two Christmas’s ago; he’d usually be watching TV with me or be at the computer. And I’ve had two long, hot baths with candles, music, the works… heaven really, and much more rewarding than watching another episode of ‘Wife Swap USA’.

I notice on this night we seem to go to bed a little earlier and perhaps more relaxed.

Our SOTI day may change and some weeks we might slip up, but I’d like to lock it in as something we do each week. With life so hectic and so much information coming at us from everywhere, having a screen free day allows us stop, switch off from the world outside and smell the roses we have right here in our hands.

Just to be sure there’s no misunderstandings, this family and their story are fictitious, but I did have fun inventing them!

We’re young and we are still learning to care for this web-baby, so please be understanding while we make sure everything works for you and looks pretty too.
Tell us what you like to see and please share any ideas about introducing SOTI into your community.

Yes, we’re aware of the irony here that; While we encourage you to Switch Off ~ Tune In ~ One Day a Week, we’re using a website to do that!

We do get that, and it is kind of funny.

But please note that we will never ask you to; ‘Be our friend on Facebook’ or ‘Follow us on Twitter’.

We think you’ve probably enough going on without us making demands.

If you do want to share the SOTI idea with others just tell them, share via your facebook page or email a link.
Actually we are already planning our demise, of the website that is and hope that by 2015, this website will be redundant.

‘Stay tuned’….Mmm…perhaps what we should say is, ‘Switch Off’ …and go have some fun.

We live gladly with less

We let go of the illusion that we can possess

We create instead

We let go the illusion of mobility

We travel in stillness We travel at home

By candlelight and in stillness

In the presence of flowers

We make our pilgrimage

We simplify our lives”

– Michael Leunig

“What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence, a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.” — HERBERT SIMON, recipient if Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics.