Hope for the future
I read this page a few weeks ago and I don’t agree with a lot of the things the author seems to pine for, like paddling kids, but the examples he uses of the “current alternative” would be amusing if they weren’t so appallingly likely to happen. For instance:
Scenario: Johnny falls while running during recess and scrapes his knee. He is found crying by his teacher, Heather. Heather hugs him to comfort him.
1967 – In a short time, Johnny feels better and goes on playing.
2007 – Heather is accused of being a sexual predator and loses her job. She faces three years in state prison. Johnny undergoes five years of therapy.
A few days later he published a message he got about the post, a rather depressing note from a high school teacher. The teacher in question said,
I am a (male) high school teacher and I have a daughter. If I see a child or (worse) a pre-teen crying on the beach I change my direction and put as much distance as possible between us. It’s too dangerous even to take a picture, imagine TOUCHING them!
Even more heartbreaking was a friend’s comment about an article he remembered reading some time ago, about a man in the U.K. who saw a 4-year-old crying in a park but did not help because he was scared to be arrested as a pedophile – the child was later found dead.
But what really made my blood boil an article I saw on the New York Times article, about how
the original Sesame Street episodes are now advertised as intended for grown ups only.
Which brought Parente to a feature of “Sesame Street� that had not been reconstructed: the chronically mood-disordered Oscar the Grouch. On the first episode, Oscar seems irredeemably miserable — hypersensitive, sarcastic, misanthropic. (Bert, too, is described as grouchy; none of the characters, in fact, is especially sunshiney except maybe Ernie, who also seems slow.) “We might not be able to create a character like Oscar now,� she said.
Looking back, I can’t even imagine a kid-oriented show nowadays like The Muppet Show putting on a sketch with Roger Moore about all the evil muppets ineptly trying to murder him, or Alice Cooper offering Kermit a contract to sell his soul to the devil. Those were the shows I grew up with, shows that had imagination, where doing something offbeat was not extraordinary, but just business as usual. The shows that gave me a sense of wonder, and taught me that everything was valid.
Popular culture has been castrated.
Not all change is bad, of course. We’ve made advances in this time. Science has progressed significantly, and will continue to do so now that Sony sucks at putting out games and PlayStation3s everywhere are massively increasing the number of Folding@Home operations. It doesn’t escape me that you’re reading this on a medium that wasn’t accessible to most people 15 years ago.
But for me some things are fundamental, and cultural progress is one of them. North America has always had the great advantage of sheer mass: on such a large body of people, the strangest, most interesting things keep popping up. And yes, that’s how I define progress in culture – anything new, anything different that inspires people to experiment: I will not become a vegan decaf skin-brander like you, but I am glad your crazy movement sprung up. This trend risks being squashed by the homogenization of culture that’s going on in the U.S.
In short, I worried that I wouldn’t see the next Darkest of the Hillside Thickets appear (yes, they’re Canadian, but Canada is playing catch-up with the U.S. on so many things already).
My first consolation was that we have the Internet now. Soon bandwidth large enough for good quality video streaming will be commonplace, and applications such as Miro will make television and the FCC irrelevant once and for all.
And then I ran into this brilliant TED Talk conference with Larry Lessig, the founder of Creative Commons, about read/write culture and how extremism in the part of the copyright owners has engendered extremism on those who would use the content.
Near the end he makes a very lucid point: this age of prohibitions has had the effect of ordinary people knowingly living their life against the law, knowing that they’ve been branded criminals. While I’m sure that this (as he calls it) corrosive reality will have the effect of making some people feel more at home with real crimes, it will eventually end up with more and more regular folks seeing governmental and institutional impositions as irrelevant.
As an Ars Digita article mentions, referring to a study by an Utah professor who calculated he accumulates about $12.45 million dollars a day on copyright liability:
What better way could there be to create a nation of constant lawbreakers than to instill in that nation a contempt for its own laws? And what better way to instill contempt than to hand out rights so broad that most Americans simply find them absurd?
The more you tighten your grasp, the more star systems will slip through your fingers, to get really geeky.
That’s something to be hopeful about.