How TV Influenced My Life

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I think TV taught me how to talk more than anything else as a child. I was of course into all the science fiction shows that were on in the 60's, where they dialoged in a super intellectual manner. So in mimicking this form of speaking I came off as sounding a lot more intellectual than I was. My mom was a news hound, so I'd also mimic people like Walter Cronkite.

Another thing that seemed to be prevalent in TV shows I liked was the main character being an unmarried unattached solitary loner type. They never seemed to get along with others all that well and had problems with authority figures. They relied upon their own ingenuity, doing things their own way on their own, usually in an unconventional manner.

Another genre was talk shows. This is where people engaged in "real life" interaction. The problem with that is, it consisted of someone yammering about themselves exclusively. So when I talked to people, I figured that's what I was supposed to do; talk about myself and my interests exclusively and in great detail.

Children's tv today is a veritable cornucopia for teaching social skills to little kids. I think that when she was in pre-k, half of my daugher's social skills came from Ni Hao Kai Lan. Because on top of social stories, there was usually a song to go with it "When you cause a problem...here's what you must do...first you say sorry, then you help to fix it, too!" Then you have Special Agent Oso who breaks everything down into "three simple steps." It's really quite awesome.

I don't remember watching much tv when I was young. Star Trek. Glad I didn't select that as a model of how to be a woman! LOL!

I think I learned quite a lot of how to interact through TV ...which was not always a good thing given how little TV can sometimes reflect the real world. One time my family were outside spending some time with another local family and a water-pistol battle started up. Thinking on my feet I tried to find some pop-culture template for how to behave in this situation. I recalled the title sequence to the soap Neighbours. It seemed like a good match since characters were having a waterfight in the title sequence and one character tipped a bucket of water over another character and everyone laughed...this didn't go down nearly as well in real life when and everyone was just furious with me. I was totally surprised with the reaction I got since I thought I had a reliable scenario to base my actions on but turns out that TV can be a dangerous template to use at times.

I agree. I've been a diehard TV watcher since infancy, and I've learned a lot about social interaction and social "rules" from watching TV. One of my first special interests was Full House, and I learned a lot from that. In my teens, I learned a lot from Degrassi: The Next Generation.

I remember a funny poster containing a long list titled: "Everything I needed to know in life I learned from watching Star Trek".

The only one I remember is, "There's no such thing as a Vulcan Death Grip".

Someday that will come in handy, I''m sure

Kid's shows taught me that being nice and sharing your toys was all you needed to do to make friends.

They were wrong.