Crary 85: "In 2006, researchers at Cornell University released results of a long-term study containing some hypotheses about the reorganization of television* in the 1980s. The research project assembled data to suggest a correlation between television viewing by very young children and autism."
* by this, Crary means "a new coalescence of factors [which] occurred in that decade [...] the widespread availability of cable TV, the growth of dedicated children's channels and video cassettes, and the popularity of VCRs, as well as huge increases in households with two or more television sets"
this all got a raised eyebrow from me, as the "extraordinary and anomalous rise in [autism's] frequency" from the 1980s on could be attributed to"enlarged diagnostic criteria" (as many people studying autism have pointed out and as Crary himself acknowledges on 85)
however, the Cornell study is interesting in that "it bypassed the notion that television is something one watches in some attentive manner, and instead provisionally treated it as a source of sound and light to which one is exposed" (86) which "might have a catastrophic physical effect on the developing human being--that it could produce extreme, permanent impairments in the acquisition of language and in the capacity for social interaction"
a "promiscuous interface with a stream of luminous stimulation," as Crary puts in on 87, following Raymond Williams