Bad Input: Video Games and TV Cause Violence, Sex

Researchers at the nonprofit organization found that adolescents with a high level of exposure to television shows with sexual content are twice as likely to get pregnant or impregnate someone as those who saw fewer programs of this kind over a period of three years. It is the first study to demonstrate this association, RAND said.

"We know that parents are busy, but sitting down and watching shows together with their teen, talking about the character portrayals, talking about what they just witnessed, and really using it as a teachable moment is really, I think, a good recommendation from this research," Chandra said.

CNN

Monkey see, monkey do, especially if -- as the researchers attempt to explain -- parents do not clearly differentiate between reality and fantasy, especially in the individual impulses of the teen. Teaching realistic thinking is always taboo but it is especially taboo as the crowd finds it repulsive, because they'd each like to imagine themselves emperors on their own imaginary islands.

About 90 percent of U.S. kids ages 8 to 16 play video games, and they spend about 13 hours a week doing so (more if you're a boy). Now a new study suggests virtual violence in these games may make kids more aggressive in real life.
Kids shouldn't play games where hunting down and killing people is the goal, says one expert.

Kids in both the U.S. and Japan who reported playing lots of violent video games had more aggressive behavior months later than their peers who did not, according to the study, which appears in the November issue of the journal Pediatrics.

CNN

If you wallpapered your room in images of extreme violence without cause, you might start to see violence as normal and thus expect it as a solution.

Violence, like guns and death and inequality, isn't bad or good. It just is. It is a tool, a means to an end, like all attributes of our physical presence (the end is the experience and results of life, and the body decays away far too rapidly for my taste). If we condition kids to see violence in the proper context, meaning as an appropriate response to a threat but not enjoyable for its own sake out of context, they may learn this delicate balance.

Otherwise, like the loud angry music they hear, the outraged/offended politicians on TV, the parents screaming for them to shut up, it becomes more background noise that conditions them toward oblivion.

On political blogs, the invective flies. Posters respond to the latest celebrity gossip with mockery or worse. Sports fans set up Web sites with names that begin with "fire," hoping coaches, athletic directors and sportscasters lose their jobs.

And though there are any number of bloggers and commenters who attempt to keep their postings and responses on a civil level, all too often interactive Web sites descend into ad hominem attacks, insults and plain old name-calling.

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"A lot of times, real anger is an attempt to get control over a situation where the person doesn't usually have it," he said. In that respect, comments to blog posts are attempts to strike back.

Those power games are innately grasped by children and teens, with schools serving as a perennial social laboratory.

CNN

The root of anger is power: many people want it, and none have it, so they are busy smashing each other to feel a brief sense of control of their own lives. And as problems proliferate, they have good reason to be angry even if their lives are pretty good by the standards of the time. After all, society as a whole is on a decline... how good can a piece of a rotting pie be?

What's interesting is that each of these three articles states the blindly obvious, yet our society is so drugged on the power of the individual to deny reality in favor of unchallenging, comfortable, stateless pursuit of pleasure that it cannot recognize them.