Forgotten concerns and a strange new respect?

Question

During the late 1960s sitcom producers decided to replace live audiences with canned laughter.

Debates raged for a while among psychologists and others about the long-range influence the canned laughter condition-response possibilities. Particularly for babies and children exposed to long bouts with television throughout the formative years.

The concern was that canned laughter represented an important step in the 'training' of the human brain to be trained by audio-visual inputs.

The debate died because the television medium presented the public with a fait accompli. Everything settled down to, "Earmark this for another look in a quarter-century".

But we forgot to look.

Lately it's come to my mind that maybe what I'm seeing on Yahoo QA is somehow canned laughter carried through multiple generations. The ultimate logical extreme.

I wonder whether I'm alone in my wonder?

Is all this silly do-gooder-ism fetish just the result of someone pushing mental buttons?

Answer 1

I wonder, yes.

As for the "do-gooder-ism fetish"--I'm sure that's as prevalent here as anywhere, however, some ppl genuinely wish to help. Disinterested acts of kindness may be few but they exist.

Answer 2

The issue just isn't forefront for me. Watching perhaps 1 hour of television per week and usually news or documentaries, the issue of canned laughter is a non-issue. We tend to overemphasize which is actually not a very common behaviour in society.

The human training that you mention was clearly ineffective. I don't laugh during most comedies and movie comedies. I don't find most of the humour amusing. Given that there are millions of us on any given night who are not gathered around the TV/radio (a television image), it is clear that this training was socially unsuccessful.