Nature: September 2008 Archive Page

Because the children were rarely bored - at least, when a television was nearby - they never learned how to use their own imagination as a form of entertainment. "The capacity to daydream enables a person to fill empty time with an enjoyable activity that can be carried on anywhere," Belton says. "But that's a skill that requires real practice. Too many kids never get the practice."

[...]

"The point is that it's not enough to just daydream," Schooler says. "Letting your mind drift off is the easy part. The hard part is maintaining enough awareness so that even when you start to daydream you can interrupt yourself and notice a creative insight." -- Jonah Lehrer, The Boston Globe

I'm always amused when the TV reports from storm landfalls are peppered with statements such as, "There's nobody here but reporters." Who needs fairness, objectivity, and nuance when there's a storm a-brewin?  Who needs balance, when you've got a pole to lean against? Oh, the drama of the live storm stand-up!

TV correspondents bellowing while taking facefuls of driving rain? Got it. Reporters hunched and squinting in the teeth of hurricane-force winds? Got that, too. Reporters dressed in the standard uniform of the intrepid weather correspondent -- colorful-but-flimsy network-logo jacket and ball cap -- to dramatize the effects of the driving rain and hurricane-force winds? Oh, yeah, got that, too.

It's not enough to report on a storm by showing TV viewers its impact. Dramatic as it is, the standard B-roll footage of pounding surf, wind-whipped palm trees and mangled power lines serves as a mere palate-cleanser. On storm stories, TV reporters are required to interact with the weather and become, potentially, human sacrifices to it.

This makes weather reporting different than every other kind of breaking TV news story. No one covers a house fire by rushing into the burning building, or reports on a war by doing stand-ups in the middle of a tank battle.

With the weather, however, participation is mandatory. -- Paul Farhi, The Washington Post