It was never that case that someone had to know how to
manufacture a gun in order to pull a trigger.
I’ve ben told that there is a higher incidence of
unintentional death due to juvenile family members getting hold of parents’
guns that there is to angry spouses shooting off more than their mouths. It’s
not that cell phones will kill you rapidly (though new reports affirm what
we’ve suspected all along; the radiation does cause nasty cancer) so much as it
is that reliance on their instantaneous connection to friends and strangers
alters, adversely, self-esteem and societal participation.
We do not really need the aggravation associated with
acculturating ourselves to such devices. Moreso, our teens do not need to be repeatedly
exposed to the latest, greatest, or otherwise superlative-referenced inventions.
Although, given the accessibility and ubiquitousness of convergent media, is it
difficult to be a contemporary adolescent and not be exposed to sex, to
violence, to rock and roll, to SEOs, and to search engine optimizations, it is
possible to be a teen and not to be overwhelmed by them.
I’ve long disdained society’s attempts to tell me what to
do. More as a person concerned with the ethics of communication, than as a
child of the 60’s (though I was among the bell-bottom and “snakeskin” vest
wearing populous), I get hives from thinking about the implications of kids
turning to so many gadgets to find fun.
Several decades ago, when I was finishing up a Ph.D. in
Human Communication, I was shocked and disheartened to discover that one of my
professors was “selling out.” In those “primitive” days, when movie studios paid,
more than the average academic wage, consultants to advise the studios about
which types of content would create the most profitable “direct to video” films
(it was decades ago market), and some specialists ran to offer up their
expertise. Rather than help our society safeguard its freedoms and rather than
aid the media in bringing an array of divergent ideas to the masses, those
specialists focused their energy on moolah. Worse, no one among their ranks was
doing any whistle-blowing about the matter.
In fairness, while I judged my teachers from the sideline, I
was not in their I-have-to-pay to-take-care-of-many-teens reality. Nonetheless,
their behavior scandalized me.
I am no less troubled today with the proliferation of
convergent media. A phone is a camera and an Ipod is a speaker for a laptop. A
computer can play movies and a piece of software can dictate the content of a
book. Sure those descriptions of our multitasking electronics are superficial,
but it was never that case that someone had to know how to manufacture a gun in
order to pull a trigger.
