Decline of attention span
Taken from TV Times.

TV does not further positive thought or action of any kind because it does not require any participation on the viewer's part, merely passive intake. TV projects the illusion of human feelings while requiring no human responses or any communication from yourself, the viewer (except to keep watching).
As human activities go this has got to be a pretty boring experience, so TV producers have to create the fiction that something new, unusual or at least different is going on.
They do this by outrageously fooling around with the imagery, and by choosing content far enough outside of ordinary life that it can qualify as interesting.
Turn on your telly and count the frequency of 'technical events' cuts, zooms, voice-overs. Each technical event - each alteration of what would be observed in reality - Is intended to keep your attention from wandering. In the average programme you'll find about ten technical events in a minute; that is, what would be real is interrupted about every six seconds. There is rarely a period of more than twenty seconds without any sort of camera trickery at all.
Each time a viewer's fixation to the screen might begin to wane, another technical event keeps the subject attached. if the camera made no movements and there was no cutting In time and place - if it merely recorded with all the pauses the conversations and experience of real life - there really would be no point in having TV on at all. You might as well turn off the set and have a real conversation with a real person.
A number of effects on the viewing population have been put forward as resulting from this TV distortion. One is that it is responsible for hyperactivity in young people - apparently, as they throw themselves around the room they may be trying to recapture the unique perspective on a situation that TV has shown them!
The University of Chicago's recently completed 13 year study on TV has concluded that "The longer a person watches TV, the more drowsy, bored, sad, lonely and hostile the viewer becomes". Although many viewers watch TV In order to relax, the survey found people were more relaxed before they switched on the set.

The medium certainly contributes to a decline of attention span
and ability to amuse ourselves; the effortless, ever-amusing TV experience makes actual activity seem too much like hard work. Leaving TV to talk or go outside the room becomes unsatis- factory, all as a result of technical hypes. Reality no longer excites - it must be seen secondhand to be experienced.

"People who have been taught, or conditioned, to listen passively to the warm verbal communications coming from the TV screen are often unable to respond to real persons because they arouse so much less feeling than the skilled actor. Worse, they lose the ability to learn from reality because life experiences seem much less interesting than the ones they see on the screen."
The Informed Heart - Bruno Bettelheim

When reading print, great areas of sensory experience are felt to be missing. Readers experience a necessity to translate images into flesh and statements Into actions. TV, by contrast, seems complete in itself. Each TV experience seems discrete, self-sufficient, true, judged and motivated and understood in
terms of itself alone. Concepts such as causation and purpose appear irrelevant.
The possibility that viewing creates a feeling of activity, of
being there and having an experience, raises the question: what effect does the constant intake of a simulated reality have upon the viewer's perception of actual reality? TV substitutes a secondary, mediated version of experience for direct experience
of the world. When TV is accepted as real (the medium makes it seem that much more exciting), then its difference from the reality is obscured. The real world itself takes on a tinge of fantasy, personal experience is devalued because it fails to come up to the expectations created by televised 'life'.
By blurring the distinction between real and unreal, TV dulls sensitivity to real events and the reality of a situation is diminished, and it is possible to react to it less emotionally, more as a spectator. People begin to act as if they were dealing with inanimate objects not with human beings at, all; another person becomes just a thing and you can 'turn them off' with a knife or a gun just like changing channels on a TV set.
By the time a child is fourteen, (s)he has watched the violent assault or destruction of nearly 38,000 human beings on TV. But, and it's a big but - complete censorship of violence from the TV screen will not reduce the dehumanizing effects of viewing - six hours daily of Terry and June seem just as likely to affect ability to respond to human realities as an equal amount of blatantly violent programmes. Or consider it this way: it is not so much the violence on the screen that leads to anti-social crime and violence; it is the craving for a constant happening, the conditioning by the constant dramatic vibration on the screen whlch equates nondrama with a feeling of nonexistence. As often as not, violence in the streets is a form of selfprovided entertainment. A bloke `called Romain Gary said that.

"The separation between the real and unreal becomes blurred...the consequences of this reappear in the papers and on the news:

A woman passes a burning building and says to her friend "Don't worry, they're probably making a TV picture".

An American Air Force pilot returns from carpet bombing in Baghdad and says of his massacre - "Man, it was just like on TV".

A man charged with the brutal murder of a six year old girl remaks "I don't know the girl so why should I have any feelings about what happened to her".

Thirty seven people see a young woman murdered in their courtyard and took on passively without coming to her aid as if it were a television drama".

Buy, TV Times: A Seven Day Guide To Killing Your TV