ABSTRACT
The first major study of the effects of television on people appeared in 1961 in a book written by Professors Wilbur Schram, Jack Lyle, and Edwin Parker and called Television in the Lives of our Children. Based on eleven separate investigations in ten different communities, the project examined how children used television. Overall, this analysis revealed that TV presented the United States as a violent country, filled with many violent people. On television, people not only used violence as the main means to reach their goals, violence also served as the primary method of conflict resolution. The task force went beyond analysis to try to find out if the norms of television modified or changed the actual norms of the viewing audience. In spite of what one might assume, television, according to McLuhan, does not simply, or even primarily, extend people's visual sense.
