rant by request: teevee

[keryx]

So, catchstars asked me for a television-related rant. What I have in me today is more a pronouncement, followed by a completely unrelated rant that's kind of tangentially about the Today Show.

The pronouncement: all good television currently on the air in some way or other owes a debt to Parker Lewis Can't Lose. I mean, there are the obvious influences: Scrubs, for instance, is PLCL with doctors instead of high school. But even shows like the West Wing owe PLCL big for proving that writing to a 5th-8th grade comprehension level didn't mean writing down or writing badly, and that wit is in fact viable on television. Wit sells.

The rant: She hosted a television special a week or so ago about kids and sex. Basically, she took the assumption that kids would talk honestly (i.e. without bravura) on television with adults, and went to make a shock-value documentary that even Geraldo Rivera wouldn't have written.

This tactic is apparently a brilliant seller with clueless adults, as the Today Show is now running a series called something like "Kids are eeeevil! And Victims! Evil Victims!" that's about all the terrible things that your kids are doing and/or that could happen to them while you're not looking. Like, they could see implications that people are having sex on the teevee or internets. They could get addicted to porn! Porn is every 5 seconds on the internets!

Or my all-time favorite: "Internet predators - now your children are most at risk from sexual victimization in their own homes!!!!"... which is true, just not the way they mean. Internet predators are pretty rare. Sexual abuse is not so rare, and is in fact more likely from people the kids know.

You probably won't be surprised that the suggestions Today Show's "experts" recommend involve things like never letting your 16 year old watch television alone and installing 80 tons of spyware on your computer. That just pisses me off. I mean, none of these so-called experts ever recommend fucking trusting or talking to kids. And they don't understand technology. And they don't understand how sophisticated teen thinking really is (clearly they didn't watch much Parker Lewis Can't Lose).

I am, as most of y'all know, generally averse to shielding kids from seeing anything that they come across in ordinary experience. But if you did think it was bad for kids such things, it seems like you'd want to deal with that by changing the kid's thinking, not by constantly monitoring them (cause constantly monitored kids grow up into such excellent, thinking adults - and of course they really appreciate being watched 24/7). Ugh. Just ugh.

Comments

[joelandrewtyson.livejournal.com]

... yep

[examorata.livejournal.com]

Tell it! I hate Katie Couric and her kind and what's happening to the purported "news" outlets in this country!

Blargh.

[keryx.livejournal.com]

Tee hee. I'm amused by the notion of Katie Couric having a "kind". Like a race of Katie Courics. :)

[strph.livejournal.com]

That's why I can't stand to watch TV news, especially the local news, because it seems like every other human-interest story is some ridiculous "exposé" of kids and predators on the internet. Like, "Do YOU know what your kids are sharing online?" And then they show screenshots of
"camwhoring" buxom fourteen year-old girls who give their full names and homeroom teacher and so forth.

Oh, and then the other day I glanced at the free magazine in our store, which is put out by some Christian org here in town, and the headline was, "Do your kids XANGA? And should you be worried about it?" So now they're getting them paranoid about blogging and online journalling? Just great. It was bad enough that my mom used to sneak into my room during the day when I was in high school and "accidentally" see my diary--now kids have to deal with their own parents stalking them online, too?

It just pisses me off that, yeah, people get so hypervigilant about protecting their kids that they forget about respecting them and giving them privacy and space to experiment and grow.

[snidegrrl.livejournal.com]

In my house if I have kids there will be software. There will not be porn in my house with kids. There will be sex ed, there will be bodies discussed and/or viewed, but there will be no porn. We'll talk about what it is and what it means. And while exploitation may be an ordinary experience, it won't happen in my house.

[keryx.livejournal.com]

If there were nothing that I defined as porn in my house, we would have no television and no magazines and pretty much nothing that was used for marketing in any way.

But while they were talking about porn, they also referenced things like blogs and music videos and the internet in general. And my stance on those things is that you can't protect your kids 100% of the time, so you have to prepare them to think critically about those things and avoid them. Just cutting off kids' access to the world as much as possible doesn't help them.