Commentary : Does Problem Lie With Tube or Viewer? : Television: New book on habits of TV watchers seems to reach some fairly obvious conclusions.

According to an oft-quoted recent study, part of a book entitled “Television and the Quality of Life: How Viewing Shapes Everyday Experience,” a normal viewer will become more passive, tense and unable to concentrate if he sits and watches, say, five hours of “Gilligan’s Island.”

It took psychologists only 13 years to reach this conclusion.

I’m willing to go a step further than the study, even though I don’t have a grant from the National Institute of Mental Health. Television’s not the problem; the viewer’s the problem. I don’t need a study to tell me that.

Yet, ever since Milton Berle put on a dress, Big Thinkers have been pondering the impact of television on us. They want to discover how television affects our eating, toilet habits, sex drives and every other aspect of our harried modern lives. They can’t decide whether television is evil or good, and they feel compelled to spend millions of dollars in an attempt to figure it out.

The “Television and the Quality of Life” project is garnering extra-heavy press coverage because it uses a supposedly fascinating methodology to help tell us what television does to us. Instead of strapping people into chairs in laboratories and asking them to respond naturally to television, 1,200 subjects, ranging in age from 10 to 82, carried pocket-sized electronic paging devices and booklets for a period of time. Every time the beeper went off, they recorded their activity and mood in the booklet.

In the proverbial nutshell, the study appears to conclude that, instead of relaxing people, television watching makes them tense and worsens their mood. The more they watch, the more lonely, sad, irritable, hostile, drowsy and bored they become. It also reveals that people tend to watch television because they have spare time, not because they want to watch a particular program.

When watching television, two-thirds of the time people are doing something else, according to the book, which means that people are not simply staring at the tube all day. I would think that’s a good sign, since it seems to suggest that televisions are becoming more like radios, providing an audio and visual backdrop for the day’s activities.

In addition, educated people reportedly watch television just as much as uneducated people, which might indicate that there is little correlation between mental achievement and television viewership. And, the researchers admit, as habitual escapist activities go, television is “no worse, and may indeed be better” than drugs or alcohol.

Somehow, none of this information seems very useful. No one, the researchers included, ever suggested that habitual television watching is a good thing. What’s more, television viewing habits--and the consequences of viewing--are the result of dozens of factors that have nothing to do with television. Many of these same factors--the need to retreat into a mindless state, the need to have activities completely unrelated to work--also helped spawn the well-documented fitness craze, which would seem to contradict the image of Americans as passive, tense couch potatoes.

If television didn’t exist, people would find other ways to become passive and less focused, given the pressures of life in the ‘90s, which seem to require some sort of escapism.

Most of these serious, often condemning, studies of television appear to miss a very basic premise. Television is little more than a reflection of society. It is the ultimate reactive medium. Television shouldn’t be branded good or evil by the way some people choose to use it, just as the inventors of the microwave oven shouldn’t be condemned because people use them to heat up mini-burritos.

The major providers of programming strive for nothing more than to give people--albeit the lowest common denominator of people--exactly what they want to watch. The Cable News Network and the Discovery Channel wouldn’t exist if people didn’t occasionally tune them in.

If one of the study’s subjects had been watching five hours a day of the Cable News Network, instead of “Gilligan’s Island,” a study would probably find him just as passive, tense and unfocused. But he would be one informed kind of guy.

With the advent of cable and satellite television, people have an unprecedented number of choices these days. That means some people will watch MTV and “Gilligan’s Island” and others will find something more mentally stimulating.

The study also is generating some controversy among Big Thinkers because it indicates that television may have positive effects on the family unit. Television “harmonizes with family life,” it concludes.

Television viewing “was not shown to be the uniformly negative phenomenon vis-a-vis the family that some have suggested,” say the authors of the book, Robert Kubey of Rutgers University and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi of the University of Chicago.

Even if this radical hypothesis is true, I can think of far better ways than television to encourage family togetherness. So it can be argued that any discussion of the impact of television on family life is a moot point, since almost every rational human being will agree that playing a game together is better for the family than watching television (unless, of course, dad cheats at Monopoly).

The authors of the book recommend that schools and parents teach children how to watch television, an idea which I’m sure would go over well with the average 10-year-old. They’d love it--it would probably be a great class to sleep through.

And then they’d go home to watch “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.”