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From: bob@imspw6.UUCP (Bob Burch)
Newsgroups: comp.misc
Subject: Re: New morality of Communications/Computer Science etc.
Message-ID: <232@imspw6.UUCP>
Date: 15 Apr 89 03:28:57 GMT
Organization: IMS, Rockville, MD
Lines: 79


 
 
From Ted Holden, HT Enterprises:
 
........................................................
From: Clayton Cramer: Optilink Corporation, Petaluma, CA
 
>One good reason: there are a lot of people who feel, just as strongly, 
>that magazines like Playboy and Penthouse should be prohibited because 
>they provide the same unrealistic, non-consequential view of sex. 
>Do we really want to repeal the First Amendment?
 
Whatever the framers of the amendment DID have on their minds, I know for
damned sure it wasn't TV.  There comes a point at which you have to take
a look around you and deal with reality as it is now, and not as it was 200
years ago.  Playboy doesn't have a push-button, 24-hour-a-day point of
entry into all of our homes which we eliminate only by relinquishing access
to our news media as well as other, more welcome and civilized fare.  Your
starting point for TV isn't Jefferson or Hamilton;  it's McLuhan and Allan
Bloom.
 
I would like to think that this point of entry into my home and the homes
of my neighbors was a privilege, which I might have some say in whether a
company was using in a reasonable manner.  My reaction to DC's WTTG showing
WWF wrestling, for example, would ideally be to remove the privilege and
the bandwidth from WTTG and give them to some other company which promised
to do better.  I'm sure such a company would not be long in forthcoming.
 
You end up having to make choices.  I can look at the books which European
children read, and at the TV shows and video games which American children
watch and play, the music they listen to and at what volumes, and a hundred
other things related to culture or, more properly, the near-total lack
thereof amongst the young in this country, and I don't need to be Albert
Einstein to figure out what America's position in the natural order is
going to be ten years down the road; it's not going to be the top of the
heap.  It all depends on how thrilled you are about the prospects of living
in the third world.
 
We've got generations of kids being RAISED by TV sets, which would be bad
enough under any circumstances, but they apparently aren't even watching
real shows anymore;  it's mostly these video atrocities which flicker from
scene to scene ten times a second.  Friends who teach five and six and
seven year olds tell me they are seeing kids whose attention spans are
exactly what you would expect from this, about one tenth of one second. 
They tell me these kids have to be protected from holding their mouths open
in the rain and drowning, like turkeys. 
 
I'm not really sure whether this discussion belongs in comp.misc or one of
soc. groups (which the IMS site doesn't get), but I believe that the lines
of demarcation between television and computers are getting a little bit
fuzzy now and will continue to get fuzzier in the near future.  I believe
that anything which is a TV problem now will probably be a TV and computer
problem in five years.
 
I find it a particularly appalling thought that someone with skills similar
to my own actually PROGRAMMED the hideous arcade games which I observe in
the 7-11 stores and other public places:  the ones in which people beat
each other to death with sledge-hammers or which pierce the air with the
death screams of some bit-blit karate fighter every 5 seconds.  I can't
picture anybody actually PLAYING one of those games longer than five
minutes, much less the lengths of time which kids actually DO play them,
without suffering permanent brain damage.  
 
It is very clear to me at least, that the world would profit from having
the perpetrators of these abominations given some kind of a serious lecture
on some kind of a new morality regarding communications/culture/computer-
science etc., possibly at gunpoint.  The only other way to deal with this
kind of problem which I could think of would resemble what the naturalists
are doing when they buy up lands to protect them from yuppies and
developers, as several posters on this topic have recently noted:  this
would involve some humanitarian group simply purchasing the arcade game
software and burying it.
 
 
Ted Holden,
HTE