Lebanese kids stressed out by wall to wall inhumanity - kids in the west have so far escaped this but are immersed in a different form of wall to wall inhumanity.The trouble with this post is that it runs contrary to the majority view, particularly that of many under 40s.
The NSPCC has run a poll of children which I find, quite frankly, bizarre. For a start the children had to be on the net to respond, they had to know to go to the site and then they were asked for degrees of how far they had been disturbed by images:
The NSPCC has run a poll of children which I find, quite frankly, bizarre. For a start the children had to be on the net to respond, they had to know to go to the site and then they were asked for degrees of how far they had been disturbed by images:
Some 377 of 497 votes cast claimed to have been disturbed by internet images. One child posted a comment on a There4me message board saying: "I've seen violent images I didn't search for. I was freaked out."
Don't get me wrong - this is a disturbing issue but it needs far more than a flawed poll which plays into the hands of the "porn and violence never disturbed me" school of justification. If a supporter of protecting children can pick holes in this poll, how much more are the opponents of it going to take it apart?
The essence is that, in a society where almost the whole of the new generation has been denied access to the traditional social contract and values, where the proliferation of porn and violence on the web cannot be checked or filtered to any discernible degree, children in a web based lifestyle, even within the school walls, are going to be drawn both by the accessibility and by the peer group mores, sliding younger and younger into this stuff.
This is not just naked female bodies here but the dislocation of any form of affection at these sites. The gaming sphere is about destruction and defence, the relations with women are shallow. It is skewing the human persona and suppressing or not mentioning one side of it, the good side, whilst playing up the other elements, e.g. revenge, these days with fiendish embellishments. And yes, I have seen them.
This is what kids are accessing and you'd have to be pretty naive to think otherwise. How on earth could you say that, with kids accessing quite sick stuff [and do you think they would settle for the tamer stuff], that they are not being affected in terms of long term jaundicing of their outlook on life?
You can quote any number of studies - in this field they are, by definition, flawed becasue this is an unquantifiable thing - but it is is sheer common sense that kids brought up in a vacuum with only these values as their late night companions, with added piquancy as parents try to bolt the stable door, are going to be affected by that. They are kids after all, for goodness sake, with underdeveloped emotional and mental equipment.
You only have to look at the streets and the schools, to compare that to three decades ago, to see that the thing has slid downhill. Without any means of reference to that earlier time, except for revisionist and selective histories, how can Generation Y and Z determine whether things have gone downhill or not?
How to educate a whole generation swamped by an industry dedicated to purveying this material and these values? One can only hope that, with maturity, the kids, after growing up, will have a Who experience, as in "905" from Who are You [1978]:
The essence is that, in a society where almost the whole of the new generation has been denied access to the traditional social contract and values, where the proliferation of porn and violence on the web cannot be checked or filtered to any discernible degree, children in a web based lifestyle, even within the school walls, are going to be drawn both by the accessibility and by the peer group mores, sliding younger and younger into this stuff.
This is not just naked female bodies here but the dislocation of any form of affection at these sites. The gaming sphere is about destruction and defence, the relations with women are shallow. It is skewing the human persona and suppressing or not mentioning one side of it, the good side, whilst playing up the other elements, e.g. revenge, these days with fiendish embellishments. And yes, I have seen them.
This is what kids are accessing and you'd have to be pretty naive to think otherwise. How on earth could you say that, with kids accessing quite sick stuff [and do you think they would settle for the tamer stuff], that they are not being affected in terms of long term jaundicing of their outlook on life?
You can quote any number of studies - in this field they are, by definition, flawed becasue this is an unquantifiable thing - but it is is sheer common sense that kids brought up in a vacuum with only these values as their late night companions, with added piquancy as parents try to bolt the stable door, are going to be affected by that. They are kids after all, for goodness sake, with underdeveloped emotional and mental equipment.
You only have to look at the streets and the schools, to compare that to three decades ago, to see that the thing has slid downhill. Without any means of reference to that earlier time, except for revisionist and selective histories, how can Generation Y and Z determine whether things have gone downhill or not?
How to educate a whole generation swamped by an industry dedicated to purveying this material and these values? One can only hope that, with maturity, the kids, after growing up, will have a Who experience, as in "905" from Who are You [1978]:
In suspended animation
My childhood passed me by
If I speak without emotion
Then you know the reason why
Knowledge of the universe
Was fed into my mind
As my adolescent body
Left its puberty behind
And everything I know is what I need to know
And everything I do's been done before
Every sentence in my head
Someone else has said
At each end of my life is an open door
I have a feeling deep inside
That somethin' is missing
It's a feeling in my soul
And I can't help wishing
That one day I'll discover
That we're living a lie
And I'll tell the whole world
The reason why
It's as computer programmers succinctly put it, the GiGo principle. Garbage in Garbage out. You expose anyone to lurid images and scenes of violence and exploitation then they'll see it as the norm.
ReplyDeleteSadly I don't have any real answers to the problems raised by such matters and I'm inherently against censorship on general principle.
It is taking the easy option to just let kids sit at the computer rather than spending time with them.
ReplyDelete