How new media supposedly keeps corrupting our children
Public figures love to play the blame game, so how new media keeps corrupting our children is a topic that comes up often. There’s just one problem, it’s not true, because parents are responsible for raising their kids. Obviously we all know the trash-talking of U.S. senators in blaming videogames for violence in children, to quote “videogames desensitize them to death and destruction.”
I don’t know about you gamers, but I’m not less emotional towards violence then I was 10 years ago, and I played a lot of Grand Theft Auto games the past 8 years…
Wired mentions it goes like this: Young people embrace an activity. Adults condemn it. The kids grow up, no better or worse than their elders, and the moral panic subsides. Then the whole cycle starts over. But don’t take anyone’s word for it, see for yourself in this overview dating back from 1790 to now.
Novels: “The free access which many young people have to romances, novels, and plays has poisoned the mind and corrupted the morals of many a promising youth; and prevented others from improving their minds in useful knowledge. Parents take care to feed their children with wholesome diet; and yet how unconcerned about the provision for the mind, whether they are furnished with salutary food, or with trash, chaff, or poison?”
- Reverend Enos Hitchcock, Memoirs of the Bloomsgrove Family, 1790
Movies: “This new form of entertainment has gone far to blast maidenhood … Depraved adults with candies and pennies beguile children with the inevitable result. The Society has prosecuted many for leading girls astray through these picture shows, but GOD alone knows how many are leading dissolute lives begun at the ‘moving pictures.’”
- The Annual Report of the New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, 1909
Comic Books: “Many adults think that the crimes described in comic books are so far removed from the child’s life that for children they are merely something imaginative or fantastic. But we have found this to be a great error. Comic books and life are connected. A bank robbery is easily translated into the rifling of a candy store. Delinquencies formerly restricted to adults are increasingly committed by young people and children … All child drug addicts, and all children drawn into the narcotics traffic as messengers, with whom we have had contact, were inveterate comic-book readers This kind of thing is not good mental nourishment for children!”
- Fredric Wertham, Seduction of the Innocent, 1954
Videogames: “The disturbing material in Grand Theft Auto and other games like it is stealing the innocence of our children and it’s making the difficult job of being a parent even harder … I believe that the ability of our children to access pornographic and outrageously violent material on video games rated for adults is spiraling out of control.”
- US senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, 2005
Categories: News
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