Screens

The Almighty Screen, Missing Info and the Plug-in Drug

By John Taylor; 2007 August 11

I have been involved more than ever this summer with the Dunnville Youth Outreach Center, a church-financed operation to reach out to children and youth. One of their activities, advertised on posters all around town, is tubing. I had never heard of it either. Tubing I learned is an easy version of water skiing, where instead of skis a boat tows a large covered-over truck tube with straps for clinging on. Every Wednesday afternoon, Bruce and Liz, the DYOC boat-owning volunteers, take them out on the Grand River, starting off from the dock by Winfield Park's launch, which is just around the corner from our home. The little kids go out for an hour and a half first, then the teens.

Last Wednesday the boatload of kids, including Silvie and Tomaso, were late. They had gone way upstream, tubing for all they were worth. I ended up waiting around, idly observing the large crowd of youths waiting their turn. Word has gotten around among them that they can get a free thrill, and a dozen of them were out in force. I am getting to know some of them; they are mostly fairly active church-going kids. Some were wearing crosses around their necks. As they waited on the dock they engaged in the mildly flirtatious boy-girl activity that you would expect. The dock is the floating kind and being a choppy day it swayed vigorously at times. The most playful boy was taken by the most nervous girl as a standing threat to push her into the water. He did not make a move but she kept crossing by, expecting to get a dunking.

"Do not push me in!"

"Don't worry, I am not going to do that."

"I swear if you do..."

And so on. It was a conversation that could have gone on in any age, except that in her agitation the girl was swearing like, well, you cannot say "swearing like a stevedore" any more, I guess you have to say "Swearing like a nervous girl raised on a steady mental diet of South Park."

Listening to them, I pondered words, names, and the function that swear words play. Profanity is a reflex of applying verbal violence to everything that goes against our will.

For someone of my generation, it is shocking to hear females swearing like that, but why? Girls are equal so why is it shocking to hear girls and not boys as much? Because, I mused, women used to refrain from profanity out of their own sense of the world. They disliked violence, so they drew back from arming their speech. Now choice has been removed. They form habits of swearing long before they are mentally prepared to form their own judgments.

Should we be surprised that the thoughts and language of the upcoming generation are formed by forces outside cultural control, outside their own control?

I am happy that by cutting off cable and broadcast television from our home years ago, our kids are not picking up the ubiquitous habit of getting words, and the function of language, topsy-turvy. Unlike their peers, South Park and other such television shows are not in their blood. And, as you might expect, Silvie, not being boob tube tutored very early on -- completely on her own -- picked up a visceral revulsion from profanity. I did not inculcate this at all, though of course neither did I offer an example of swearing myself. She still retains a strong disapproval and often admonishes Grampa for using words like "hell" or "damn," imprecations so mild that her peers hardly understand them as swearing. Even animated programs directed at very young children include them; I know, I am forced to see them more often than I would like.

But in spite of that, they are not spared a place in screen heaven. I found over this summer that if I leave Silvie and Tomaso to their own resources they will automatically sit in front of a screen (Internet, Youtube shows, computer games, DVD's or videos) from morning to night. Only with a conscious, vigorous application of force do I get them out the door into fresh air for an hour or two each day.

Although they enjoy the Wednesday tubing adventure, without constant reminders and coaxing they would be locked in front of a screen all afternoon, like any other day.

Just imagine, the combined efforts of more than a dozen churches to drag youth away from the Almighty Screen have only partly succeeded. The free tubing offer is starting to have an effect only now that most of the summer is past. If you had made such an offer back in the 1950's, I am sure that the boat would have been overloaded on the first day, never mind after four months of weekly excursions.

This is a nightmare.

Both Orwell and Aldous Huxley got their dystopias completely wrong. It did not take a totalitarian state (1984) or psychological conditioning (Brave New World) to enslave this entire generation, all it took was a screen.

I think that I have been writing about caves these past months for this very reason, caves are central to our age. For a thousand generations Plato's Den was understood as a mere story with interesting philosophical overtones, a simile. But today it is become prophesy.

His nightmare vision was of a world where people are chained by their own beliefs and desires, forced to watch shadows. In his words, a "strange image," peopled by "strange prisoners," ogling shadow displays, shadows on a cave wall of their own bodies dancing in the light of a wavering fire situated behind their backs. If you doubt the prophetic implications, check out the Holy Qu'ran, which implicitly uses the same image as Plato,

"And say: The truth is from your Lord, so let him who please believe, and let him who please disbelieve; surely We have prepared for the iniquitous a fire, the curtains of which shall encompass them about; and if they cry for water, they shall be given water like molten brass which will scald their faces; evil the drink and ill the resting-place." (Qur'an 18:29, Shakir, tr.)

Plato's Den is no metaphor, it _is_ the world. When I go for a quiet walk in the evening, I look into people's living rooms and view the tiny television or computer display that is always in there somewhere. I notice one thing about it. The "real" world, the stuff we see through our eyes directly, just does not compare with the brilliance of a screen. The screen is brighter, more vivid, it has deeper color depth than anything you see, even outside in the brightest sunlight.

So, the Den is no longer parable, it is prophesy, a literal description of our screen-obsessed world. Instead of shadows on a cave wall we have CRTs and LED displays, but beyond that there is no substantive difference. Our children are lured from reality and are systematically indoctrinated by dead, random shadows on walls. Being exposed before the age of discrimination, this is all they can know, all they care to believe exists.

I just made two acquisitions on this theme for my too rapidly expanding library. The first is "The Age of Missing Information," by one Bill McKibben. He wrote the first book on climate change in 1989, "The End of Nature," and, Wiki tells us, his

"most recent book, `Deep Economy: the Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future,' published in March 2007, addresses what the author sees as shortcomings of the growth economy and envisions a transition to more local-scale enterprise."

I do not have either, but the latter I would like to see. Anyway, the book I have,

"The Age of Missing Information, was published in 1992. It is an account of an experiment: McKibben collected everything that came across the 100 channels of cable TV on the Fairfax, Virginia system (at the time among the nation's largest) for a single day. He spent a year watching the 2,400 hours of videotape, and then compared it to a day spent on the mountaintop near his home. This book has been widely used in colleges and high schools..."

The Wiki site also includes this quote from the book,

"...We believe that we live in the 'age of information,' that there has been an information 'explosion,' an information 'revolution.' While in a certain narrow sense that is the case, in many more important ways just the opposite is true. We also live at a moment of deep ignorance, when vital knowledge that humans have always possessed about who we are and where we live seems beyond our reach. An unenlightenment. An age of missing information." (Age of Missing Information, p. 9)

As for my earlier observation the problem of the real world cannot be compared to the compelling beauty of computer screens, this observation is in this book too:

"...It worries me because it alters perception. TV, and the culture it anchors, and drowns out the subtle and vital information contact with the real world once provided." (The Age of Missing Information, p. 22)

The second book is by Marie Winn, "The Plug-In Drug, Television, Computers, and Family Life." (1977, updated 2002) It is a "scathing critique of television's addictive influence on the young." Library Journal reviews this book like this:

"After 25 years, Winn (Children Without Childhood) has completely revised and updated her landmark study of the influence of television on children and family life by incorporating findings based on recent research and investigating the impact of the home computer, the VCR, and the video game terminal. She has also shifted the focus from the TV programs children watch to the negative effects of television on children's play, imagination, and school achievement. Although Winn pinpoints many key shortcomings of television, this study is not argumentative; Winn instead aims to stress the quality of family life without television, to show educators and parents how to control the medium, and to offer practical suggestions on how to improve family life not dependent on television. This refreshingly candid and inviting study is highly recommended for both public and academic libraries."

Winn, who was born in Prague, objects to the Almighty Screen because, "The television experience allows the participant to blot out the real world and enter into a pleasurable and passive mental state." Just like the denizens of Plato's cave. You can read more about the Plug-in Drug at:

http://www.mariewinn.com/plugin.htm