An excellent article that should be read and reread by those concerned about media violence.

As Ms. Brown correctly states, the major professional organizations, including the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, and the AMA have all squarely concluded that media violence has dire effects on children. This included emotional numbing to violence, increased fear and greater proneness to seeing violence as a way to solve a problem and then resorting to it more readily.

Though I have stated all of this frequently in my articles and tweets over the last year, it is clear how the matter of media violence has become politicized. While I am generally a supporter of Mr Obama and Mr Biden, it is distressing to see how they have apparently uncoupled this subject from the issue of gun control, even though the two are inextricably linked. I was astonished to read that when Mr. Biden’s task force was doing its work, he never met with those organizations or researchers who have been sounding the alarm bells about the problems with media violence, only those on the other side, namely the makers of these films, TV shows, etc.

Is this just a matter of lobbying forces winning out? The idea of calling for more studies is always an easy way to punt the controversy into the future. While more research is always helpful to refine certain points, and such research is constantly being done, calls for such research will undoubtedly lead to jockeying for center stage among researchers, struggles over who will get the funding, and then a need to look carefully and trenchantly at the results of such studies, even though plenty of research on the basic questions has already been done.

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A fabulous article, one worth reading and re-reading. A research psychologist at UNC draws some interesting societal conclusions that grow out of solid psychological research. It seems that too much screen time can be quite detrimental to the health of your heart.

By heart she means both the actual heart, or more precisely the vagal nerve that supplies nerve connection to the heart, and ones’ overall emotional connection to other humans.

She describes research in which she and her group work to understand how connectedness between human beings enhances their vagal tone, that is the variability in heart rate possible for a given human. The more direct connectedness one experiences with other humans, the higher the vagal tone. The opposite is also apparently true,: the more connection with media machines, the lower the vagal tone.

So over connection with media machines and less time in face to face contact with other humans does take its toll, and the changes become hardwired in our central nervous system. Though the results of her group’s research are yet to be published, I look forward to reading them with much anticipation.

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Yet another story about how the media so totally becomes part and parcel of the lives of American teens in ways they can barely comprehend.

Two teen males repeatedly rape a drunken teenage girl. First in a car and then in a basement. Terrible behaviors and ensuing trauma that has plagued the world of teens for centuries. What makes matters different here is the boys’ making pictures of it and sending it out on their cellphones, presumably on a lark.

On one side, the social media-derived pics became central to the subsequent legal case, which ended in convictions. On the other, the girl, who seems to have suffered from amnesia during the rapes, now has to suffer through her defiled image going viral around the world.

One part of this story hard to grasp is why these drunken teen boys took the pictures in the first place. What’s so funny and delicious about letting such photos go viral? A way of manifesting their machismo, I suspect. To their friends, who are cheering them on?

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A terse article well worth reading. Its author makes an excellent point about how media violence can lead to both fear and real life violence. He turns to the George Gerbner idea of the “mean world syndrome” to explain how consuming over many years a heavy diet of violent media impacts on how an individual sees the world, namely as unsafe.

He uses as an example how an NRA spokesman recently stated that the antidote to a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun. Essentially, Americans have bought into the idea of fighting violence with violence due to the fact that such a notion is at the heart of many story lines sold to us by the media, from John Wayne to Dirty Harry to Fight Club. Violence is the milieu within which we swim as a society, and so to protect yourself, you need to pack a gun or at least use violence to defend yourself, we are told over and over.

One way to change the culture of violence is through the media creating more prosocial and dialogue-driven shows like Downton Abbey and few shows soaked in violence like Django Unchained. The problem here is that violence supposedly sells. I say this is not true, however, but rather that dialogue-driven shows require better and more sensitive writers whereas with violence, it’s just a matter of the writer going with his or her most blood-tinged fantasies and letting them rip.

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A point not developed is that the violence has become, as the years have passed, more and more gory, gratuitous, and laced with sexual content, i.e., rape and murder are mingled.

Kevin Bacon on Fox TV’s THE FOLLOWING.

Two experts of note are mentioned. A scholarly article by Dr Eugene Beresin, an old colleague of mine from Harvard, is paraphrased. The point is clear: media violence does impact on children in terms of their tendencies toward aggression.

And George Gerbner, longtime expert on the media, is highlighted. His idea about how watching violent media leads to the development of the so-called ‘mean world syndrome’ stands front and center in this article. He was one of the first experts to suggest that desensitization to violence via chronic media watching is becoming a broad based national problem.

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A very valuable look at the state of play involving violence and the media and its effects on kids.

As the author rightly points out, most issues in social science are never truly “settled” in the same way that Newton’s three laws or Einstein’s law of relativity have become settled laws of physics. Rather, he declares that the prevailing theory is that media violence does have negative impacts on children’s proclivity toward violence.

He then cites some of the major articles, pro and con. What needs to be looked at carefully is nuance here. For instance, some of the “naysayers” point out that, relative to other variables, like socioeconomic class, and mental illness, playing hours of violent video games is not as problematic or weighty in its effect.

But what is also inherent in the “prevailing” point of view, namely that violent media is causal in the development of violence in kids, is the researchers then building on this point of view and moving the research further ahead into other questions, like whether certain kids, maybe ones suffering from mental illness or living under harsh socioeconomic circumstances, are more likely to incorporate violence from the media more readily than other children into their identities and actions.

This is a point at which the prevailing side and the naysayers may find common ground.

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A must-read article featuring a technology security expert at the University of Notre Dame Kolin Hodgson, who spoke with a group of sixth graders in South Bend, Indiana. His conclusions are a bit chilling. And his recommendations are quite firm, even stern.

He points out how easily kids on the web and Facebook specifically can be hurt by social media, and he recommends that parents not allow their children to have access to the web in their bedrooms. He points out that no caring parent would allow a stranger in his child’s bedroom. Since the web allows strangers to gain easy access to children, a parent is doing just that if the web is too easily available.

He cites the well-known case of Amanda Todd who became involved in showing nude pics of herself to a male, then suffered through the photos going viral and her being bullied incessantly. She committed suicide.

Though the actual case of Todd was quite complicated, overlaid with her own low self esteem, her living in a divorced family, and her moving back and forth between her two parents’ homes, the case is apt. And the teen behavior of sexting on the net is quite common.

While no one wants to be seen as a prude and kill-joy in these matters, the problems fomented by the social media can be serious, and parents, especially tech-unsavvy ones, need to wake up.

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An article that clarifies how deeply high tech media devices are now embedded in our lives. They are here to stay. From year to year they may become more integral to our lives.

Please note that the author of this piece works for Fisher Price, a toy-making company that has now invested much in developing and marketing high tech toys. So he has a lot to win if parents get with the program.

He of course tips his hat to the parents who he acknowledges make the final choices on what media gadgets fall into the hands of our kids, but we all know that the matter is a little bit more complicated than parents just making choices. First, the kids watch the media and clamor for certain items.

Second, the parents are often overwhelmed with busy lives and too readily turn to the media gadgets to do a bit of babysitting. The family dynamic becomes circular as the child often has easy access to media advertising that only whets his or her appetite for new media creations, new apps and gadgets for which the child clamors for access.

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An interesting article in three parts. In the first part, the author reviews a recent case of girls taking snapshots of themselves nude and sending them out via cellphones to their friends. They think the photos will “self-destruct,” but the problem is they don’t. They spread like wildfire.

The authorities act appropriately and work to destroy all photos in cyberspace, but as the article states, who knows where the pics may pop up on the future.

In the second part, she muses on how tied she is to using cellphones as a way for her to stay in instant touch with her own child and how indispensable this connection has now become to her and her child. So she couldn’t possibly give it up.

I wonder why the connection is so necessary even though until recently such a possible connection was technically impossible, and kids usually turned out okay.

In the third part of the article, the author interviews a developer of a website that offers parents advice on how to deal with their and their children’s issues and concerns regarding the using of cellphones. The major point here seems that, if you’re going to give your underage child a smart phone, then you the parent need to know a heck of a lot about how powerful the phone is and be able to handle it deftly yourself so that your child won’t be as likely to get into trouble with it because you’re not supervising the thing tightly enough.

Wow, it sure is a lot to ask of overly busy parents!

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