The way families attend to media is a very unselfconscious expression of that mythology. Parks challenges her undergraduates, in a course called American Culture in the Information Age, with a little exercise. The answer, of course, is TV, with between 98 and 99 percent of households having at least one television set, and the majority of homes more than one. The average TV set is on five to seven hours every day. No other market product has that saturation.
Small children watch TV more than they do anything else but sleep.
Add to this weight the amount of time we spend listening to the radio, playing music, watching videos, going to the movies, reading books, newspapers, comic books, surfing the Internet, and we begin to understand the power of media to influence and shape ideas and actions. Parks asserts that we turned to media, particularly to TV, to fill voids in our social structure created by the breakdown of the extended family, the mobility of modern families, the anonymity of housing developments and high rises, the drop off in social gatherings. Students are already cynical about the role of media in the culture, but when they see what a profound influence it has in their personal and social lives, they get excited about that awareness, Parks says. TV is a contradiction and a paradox. It seems to demand nothing of the viewer, except that it be viewed.