-
“CNN fired me, and did it without even a thought to the power that I might wield as an average person with a brain, a computer, and an audience. The mainstream media doesn’t believe that new media can embarrass them, hurt them or generally hold them accountable in any way, and they’ve never been more wrong.”
-
So there’s this writer at The Times Online (British Times, not New York) who seems to be the latest graduate of The Kevin McCullough School of Irresponsible Pseudo-Journalism. The gist of her latest article is that many adult men are basically grown-up babies, unable to emerge from their youth because of their silly predilection for their most childish of habits: video games.
I know, it’s 2008 on the internet and I shouldn’t even deign to respond to attention whores like this writer. I understand that if we feed the troll, her goal is achieved. I just can’t let gems like these go unanswered…
At my college evening class last week, two intelligent, thirtysomething suited guys – solicitors or managers to judge from their e-mail addresses – were talking about their new Xbox 360s and what transcendent joy was to be had from them. I eavesdropped more attentively. Apparently, in Gears of War, the smallest details of the largest battles were crystal clear, in widescreen! Surely they were discussing their children’s computer games? Xboxes are toys, after all.
As are DVD players, computers, and board games, right? Surely, this woman has seen grown men playing chess in a park, and didn’t remark to herself that they were silly for playing with toys.
This reeks of the same naivete that puts the anachronistic notion in many people’s heads that fans of animated programming or comic books are stuck in their childhood because OhmyGodyoulikecartoonsandcartoonsareforkids! Um, no, there are whole realms of animation and comics that are specifically designed for adult consumption, not to mention graphic novels. Certainly, advertisers have been paying attention to this marketplace for quite some time, seeing as how they actually know how to do the research.
But wait–this writer did the research, too! She just ignored it.
Worried, I went unto Google and retrieved this trend for you: Nielsen Media Research surveyed American men aged 18 to 34 and found 48 per cent of them had used a games console recently, and on average, it was for 2 hours 43 minutes per day. Yes, half of not-so-young men spend nearly three hours a day gaming.
Kate, my dear, if that worries you, I beg you not to look up the statistics on hours spent watching TV.
Yes, there are plenty of adult gamers and no, we don’t appreciate being marginalized a la Fox News. Video games did $8 billion more in business than movies did in 2007 in the US. Note to journalists: If you don’t take gamers seriously, we’ll return the favor.
[The Dark Ages - Times Online]
Categories: Video Games, WTF
Comments (2)
Can anybody ’splain me why there is a “MARTA Tax” on my cable bill? What does Comcast have to do with MARTA?
Categories: Weird, Asides
Comments (2)
-
Once you put the cameras up, it’s just. that. easy. I don’t feel so “slippery slope” about being against these things now, for this exact reason.
-
Nostalgia alert! Yes, it was a ripoff of Sonic the Hedgehog, but I spent months with this game at the age of 13.
-
I’m always just ready to claim “Officer, I wasn’t warning other drivers about the speed trap; I just saw a guy with a coffee mug on his roof.”
-
- Going to vote in the primary tomorrow after a week of trying and failing to find time to advance vote. Ron Paul needs all the help I can give him, especially given that his buzz has waned quite a bit on the internet. It seems like Ron Paul Fever is giving way to the ever growing Obamania. Obamassacre? Obamanslaughter? I guess I’m just not as good at coining neo-bama-logisms as Ken Jennings. Segue alert!
- Going to meet Ken Jennings (again) at the Margaret Mitchell House tomorrow evening to hear him discuss–and see him sign–his latest.
- Finished The Birthday Party last week. I finally read this on a year-old recommendation on boingboing.net. This is a very good story, recounted chillingly, if a bit amateurishly, by the federal prosecutor who was kidnapped in 1998. A stellar example of an unputdownable book, this one had me up until 2am finishing it the same day I got it from the library.
- Also read Then We Came to the End, completely on the recommendation of Tony Simon’s metaphorical pizza of literature. This is not the kind of novel I usually read. The summary wouldn’t have piqued my interest in the least: “A group of copywriters and designers at a Chicago ad agency face layoffs at the end of the ’90s boom.” But this is something substantial. It’s about office life, something which which I am intimately familiar, and about cancer, with which I am not. The book will resonate clearly, as it did with me, with anyone who works in an office.
- Currently checked out: Altered Carbon and The World Without Us. Not sure which I will finish first.
Categories: Quick Thoughts, Books, Friends, Funny
Comments (2)
If your kid has a cell phone, you need to crush it into a 2-inch cube as soon as you can, before it leads them into a life of evil.
Or at least that’s the gist of this CNN story. This type of article reminds me of Drew Curtis’s words as I’m slowly making my way through the Fark book that my sister-in-law got me for Christmas. There’s a whole section on this type of fear-mongering, alarmist, non-stories that are all too common in the current media landscape. This is the easy three-step process that most media outlets follow to create their own alarmist stories:
- Find something that has been a legitimate danger to a very small number of people. Let’s say, the “choking game“.
- Interview people who have suffered some personal harm or loss from this danger, and thus are likely to drum up as much emotion as possible in your readers/viewers.
- Blow the idea completely out of proportion, preying on your audience’s fears that–gasp–it could happen to them!
- Try to find some new material for another story on Natalee Holloway.
So, cell phones are evil. These one or two times, a teacher used a cell phone to build an inappropriate relationship their student. And you probably have one in your home!!!!! Film at 11. The story goes on to detail exactly how predators will “groom” your kids for an encounter via their cell phone, and even includes this chilling story:
A recent case involves Kelsey Peterson, a 25-year-old Nebraska teacher accused of having sex with a 13-year-old former student. She faces federal charges for allegedly kidnapping the teen and taking him to Mexico to have sex.
An Associated Press reporter, Elliott Spagat, interviewed the boy while he was in Mexico and told CNN about it. The boy recounted being groomed, telling Spagat that Peterson “was his best friend. He was having problems with gangs … and he said she would lend an ear whenever he needed it,” Spagat said.
That does sound like a pretty terrible situation, but why did CNN use it to demonize cell phones? In the Peterson case, this teacher used email messages and handwritten letters to build the relationship. Lock up your pencils and paper, parents, for they are the tools of predators.
Of course, buried in the article is the, you know, sensible advice that perhaps you should just be more involved with your kid and make sure you know where they are going and who they are talking to on the phone. I suppose that “Parents Who Are More Involved in their Kids’ Lives Better Able to Protect Them” would be a far more appropriate headline for the article, but that’s not threatening enough.
By the way, if you have kids, watch out; the internet is trying to MURDER THEIR TOYS.
Categories: Politics, School, In the news
Comments (2)
