2371) Americans have an extraordinary love-hate relationship with the rich culture they've created. They buy, watch and read it even as they ban, block and condemn it.

Jon Katz
Virtuous Reality (1997)

2372) THE MEDIA MANTRA: It's not that complicated. I can figure this out. I can make my own decisions about media, values and morality, I don't have to choose between traditional culture and the new media. I can live a happy and fulfilling life even if I never see the World Wide Web.

Whatever they should or shouldn't watch, however much time they spend online, my children are not dumb and they're not in danger from movies TV shows, music or computers. Many children - especially underclass children, really are suffering from horrific violence, and they need more and better parenting, better schools, fewer guns and drugs, and lots of job opportunities. If I'm so worried about kids, I will help them.

If I really want to protect my own children, I will make sure they have more, not less, access to this new cultural and technological world. I won't ever call them stupid for watching things I don't like. I don't have to be at war with them. I can work out a social contract with my children that protects them, guides them through their culture and brings peace and rationality to our house.

Jon Katz
Virtuous Reality (1997)

2373) Modern media companies are no longer run by powerful individuals willing to take the heat for their decisions, but by conglomerates of corporate lawyers, Wall Street analysts, directors and powerful stockholders - all of whom dread controversy and legal difficulties because negative publicity can adversely affect stock prices and mergers, or even call down federal regulation.

Jon Katz
Virtuous Reality (1997)

2374) It sometimes happens, that men who preach most vehemently about evil and the punishment of evil, so that they seem to have practically nothing else on their minds except sin, are really unconscious haters of other men. They think the world does not appreciate them, and this is their way of getting even.

Thomas Merton
Seeds of Reflection (1949)
quoted by Jon Katz in
Virtuous Reality (1997)

2375) Th[e] ancient conflict [between the forces of "good" and the forces of "evil"] echoes through the language, imagery and passion surrounding children and media. One brand of culture is good, the other satanic; one medium safe, another dangerous. The Mediaphobe continuously evokes evil in his battle to beat back the forces surrounding him - perversion, corruption, ignorance, debasement. But unthinking, centuries-old notions of good and evil bear little relevance to the cultural choices of the young. Nor do the prejudices and phobias of their parents.

Change is inevitable and pervasive. Short of the most Draconian kinds of censorship and Luddism, there is no stopping the new media and their young consumers. Perhaps it's time to start teaching children how to cope with sexually explicit imagery rather than persisting in the fiction that we can make it evaporate.

Jon Katz
Virtuous Reality (1997)

2376) A central tenet of the Mediaphobe is that guns don't kill people; unwholesome movies, tabloid telecasts, video games and rap music do. That new media are not only corrosive and decivilizing but literally dangerous.

Jon Katz
Virtuous Reality (1997)

2377) When someone offers a study purporting to show that the online culture is riddled with pornography and is dangerous to children, they are as happy to believe it and spread the message as they were to report that comic books threatened decency (in the forties), that rock and roll was dangerous (in the fifties), that video games turned kids violent (in the eighties).

Jon Katz
Virtuous Reality (1997)

2378) [G]rown-ups all seem to lose the neurological chip that enables them to call up their own youth. The point of much of adolescent culture is to be offensive, to individuate kids from their parents, to help define their own idea and values. Popular culture has been helping them to do that for a good half-century now.

Adult America - astonishingly, including the very baby boomers who, helped midwife rock and roll - takes pop culture literally, which is the worst and \more useless way to approach it. Beavis and Butt-head are not advocates of \stupidity but ironic commentators on it. The rhetorical style of many rap artists are absorbed by listeners not as literal advisories but as more complex expressions of attitude, values and group identity. [...]

The problem isn't that popular culture is eroding our civic and moral fabric, but that we take it far more seriously than its creators or consumers do; we give it more weight than it deserves

Concerns about how much time children spend unattended in front of screens or locked in their bedrooms with computers, are perfectly valid. Good parents always curb their children's unhealthy excesses, from overindulging in Chee-tos to joining a pack of neighborhood vandals. But the notion that exposure to pop culture is inherently dangerous is unsupported by research, statistics or common sense. We lose credibility with kids by giving it such weight. Most MTV watchers are safe, law-abiding, middle-class children; they know quite well that exposure to vulgar videos won't send them out into the streets packing guns or into their bedrooms wearing leather bustiers.

Years of battles over comics, rock and other forms of youth culture seem to have left us none the wiser. We tale the bait every time. Rather than engage our children in intelligent dialogue, we simply come across as the pompous out-to-lunch windbags many of us have become.

Jon Katz
Virtuous Reality (1997)

2379) Conscience is a conditioned reflex, psychological researcher Hans J. Eyseneck believes. Like Pavlov's salivating dogs, people develop automatic, unthinking reactions. Punished consistently by a beloved parent for telling a lie or stealing a cookie, we become nervous when lying or stealing, even if there is no chance of being caught.

So if parents teach morals, live moral lives, discourage and punish immoral behavior and treat their children in amoral way, the children are much more likely to act morally as adults. If the children are left to fend for themselves, are given no such encouragement, they may grow up without a strong moral sense. A child watches the moral judgments and decisions of his parents, his siblings and his peers, and factors in the degree of rationality and respect with which he is treated, in forming his own value system.

The idea that a TV show or a song lyric can transform a healthy, connected, grounded child into a dangerous monster is absurd, an irrational affront not only to science but to common sense, to what we know about the children in our lives. It is primarily the invention of politicians (who use it to frighten or rally supporters), of enduringly powerful religious groups (which can't teach the young doctrine and dogma without control), and of traditional journalism (which sees new media and new culture as menaces to its own once-powerful and highly profitable position in American society).

Jon Katz
Virtuous Reality (1997)

2380) In the end, America's cultural wars are as pointless as they are unwinnable. We have created the richest cultural life in the world. Some of the things our culture creates are garish and awful, some spectacular and brilliant. We get to decide which varieties we use. We get to introduce our children, carefully and thoughtfully, to a world of one-unimaginable variety, creativity and stimulation.

This seems cause for celebration, not alarm.

Jon Katz
Virtuous Reality (1997)