Fearing for children is a classic move in technology anxiety. Joel Bakan returns to it in an op-ed and book, adding an interestingly Gothic twist.
"[C]hildhood itself is now in crisis", declares Bakan, and focuses on electronic media.
children spend more hours engaging with various electronic media — TV, games, videos and other online entertainments — than they spend in school. Much of what children watch involves violent, sexual imagery...
We might wonder how he determines that "much", or it really means "a lot", or "too much for my tastes." I'll check in the book when it appears.
Bakan invokes electronic media, but seems really focused on the internet and phones, rather than mainstream tv and movies, as his piece's lead makes clear:
WHEN I sit with my two teenagers, and they are a million miles away, absorbed by the titillating roil of online social life, the addictive pull of video games and virtual worlds, as they stare endlessly at video clips and digital pictures of themselves and their friends, it feels like something is wrong..
TV is something of a ghost here. How much of that "more hours" is tv? And is he aware of two generations' worth of tv crit, or is he doing the classic technofear move of claiming to be the first to discover the topic?
The twist: Bakan isn't interested in social media. It's old-fashioned broadcast, mass media that concerns him. His main villain isn't corrupted/mislead youth, but big business. That was the target of his previous book, which became a documentary film.
So that villain, big capital, becomes a child predator who uses electronic media to attack kids. It's a classic Gothic plot, leading Bakan to some lyricisim:
our current failure to provide stronger protection of children in the face of corporate-caused harm reveals a sickness in our societal soul.
It seems pretty stark and simple. The editorial doesn't leave any room for children's agency, reflection, or creativity, as per most fearsome media accounts. The book apparently keeps up this simplistic tone, as one reviewer describes,
the entire history of child abuse and neglect disappears from view. What is left is a Manichean face-off between Bad Corporations and Good Parents, who have only good intentions toward their children.
Note how the corporate villains also poison children, in Bakan's account. Literally: he inveighs against medication and pollution.
(via Reasonblog)
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