Culture Notes

A set of their own

A new survey of 2,000 children in grades 3 to 12 finds that children watch an average of 21 hours of television per week. Seventy-one percent say their parents set some rules about their TV watching. But the prospect of parents overseeing what their children are watching is undercut by another statistic: Over half of America's children, 58 percent, have their own TV sets in their bedrooms.

Virtual adultery

More and more reports are surfacing of marriages being broken up by the Internet. Some spouses become computer addicts, spending so much time on the World Wide Web that they withdraw from their families. Others are succumbing to the lure of the pornographic chat-lines. Another problem is real-time love affairs, as the intimate, anonymous conversations with strangers made possible by the new communication technology lead some websurfers to fall in love-at-no-sight with someone known only by an e-mail handle. This sometimes leads to a face-to-face rendezvous and, increasingly, to the divorce courts.