immediate gratification
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As television begins to render invisible the traditional concept of childhood, it would not be quite accurate to say that it immerses us in an adult world. Rather, it uses the material of the adult world as basis for projecting a new kind of person altogether. We might call this person the adult-child… Television promotes as desirable many of the attitudes that we associate with childishness - for example, an obsessive need for immediate gratification, a lack of concern for consequences, and almost promiscuous preoccupation with consumption.
Neil Postman -
The idea of children implies a vision of the future. They are the living messages we send to a time we will not see. But television cannot communicate a sense of the future or, for that matter, a sense of the past. It is a present-centered medium, a speed-of-light medium. Everything we see on television is experienced as happening now. The grammar of television has no analogue to the past and future tenses in language. It amplifies the present out of all proportion and transforms the childish need for immediate gratification into a way of life. We end up with what Christopher Lasch calls “the culture of narcissism” - no future, no children, everyone fixed at an age somewhere twenty and thirty.
Neil Postman