Southwest Virginia Blogs

Online today from the Bristol paper, one story denouncing the cost to consumers of electricity, another story bashing the coal business and looking forward to the "post-carbon era."

Meanwhile, the NYT reports here that burning coal at home is making a comeback, while declaring in favor of a gas tax.

Wired has a thoughtful article about the potential (good and bad) for a broadband stimulus initiative. There is much speculation that the incoming adminstration will, among other spending initiatives, provide funds for broadband deployment.

Ironically, taking fiber to every home and business in America (about 80 million premises), would be much less expensive than many of the other "bailout" initiatives and would be much more likely to have positive effects. The total cost would probably be around $175 billion if done the right way, which is a series of well-designed local and regional initiatives pursuing a single open access, open services network with all telecom services provided by the private sector (and the network, the digital road system, managed locally or regionally as a public good).

Ownership and management structures should be allowed to vary; in some places direct municipal ownership might be the best approach. In other parts of the country, a regional broadband authority or a broadband coop might be more appropriate.

What we don't need is handouts to the incumbent telcos, who have, for the most part, diligently pursued failed business models and who have stubbornly refused to provide affordable business class services in the face growing demand. And we don't need a Federal Bureau of Telecommunications creating an Orwellian nightmare of centrally managed services. Local and regional governments have successfully managed road networks locally for decades. We can use this tried and true approach to build digital road systems. The Interstate Highway System is a good example of useful Federal intervention: Federal funds financed the development of highways, but states took over ownership and management once they were built.

We now just need to push that down a level, as what is badly needed is NOT more "information superhighways," but instead local connections to homes and businesses. When you get down to hooking up local property, this is best managed locally. Do we really want State or Federal agencies plowing up our yards and streets? Better to work with local governments, who already do this very well with water, sewer, and roads.

Years back I was discussing violent video games with a friend of mine. I expressed the opinion that violent games are not a prime cause of violence but a distraction from root causes. My friend said “how many studies do you need to prove to you that violent media causes violent kids?”

A good question. And one I couldn’t answer at the time.

Gerard Jones, author of Killing Monsters, insists that the issue is not quantitative but qualitative. That is, most of the studies linking media violence and youth violence are crap. I’m working my way through the book now, but there’s page after page of this:

A 1998 UCLA study has been widely quoted as showing that the average child will have seen 6,000 violent deaths on television by the time he leaves elementary school. On closer examination, that number turns out to be the number of violent deaths a child could see if he watched all the violent programs available to him — if he watched more hours of Homicide than Rugrats. [ Killing Monsters, Gerard Jones, p. 54 ]

The study is measuring availability in the general culture, not actual youth exposure:

When children’s viewing habits are taken into account, we discover that most children probably see no violent deaths through their first six or so years, then a modest number when they start to take an interest in more adult programs and movies. [ Ibid. ]

There’s also “violent acts” as well as violent deaths. This epinions article from 2001 has an astonishing number:

Did you know that by the time the average child finishes elementary school, they have viewed as many as 100,000 violent acts on television? [ The Electronic Babysitter ]

Of course, “violent acts” can be broadly defined to inflate that number. Gerard Jones again:

…a 2001 Harvard study announced that 60 percent of video games rated “E” (for everyone) included violence. But the violence turns out to include Pac Man eating ghosts and Gex the cartoon geko tail-whipping skeletons. [ Killing Monsters, Gerard Jones, p. 55 ]

According to Jones, other studies involved showing kids violent images without context under uncomfortable laboratory conditions, then insisting the children play with children they’ve never met. Or they interpreted aggressive play acting (pretend shooting, etc) as “violent,” even if neither the intent nor result of the act was injury. One study showed children a video of someone hitting an inflatable clown, then concluded the media caused violent behavior because those children then proceeded to punch their own inflatable clowns.

This doesn’t mean media violence has no effect on children, but it does suggest that the effect is not as well understood as we’ve been led to believe. It also certainly suggests that popular ideas about youth exposure to media violence are exaggerated.

And, Gerard suggests, under the right circumstances there are beneficial results from exposure to media violence (and violence in childhood fantasy) that we haven’t begun to explore because it’s always assumed violence is bad.

Stuff takes up way too much space. I’m going to do something about that this year. I can’t believe some of the things I’m basically paying the apartment complex to store for me. Here on my desk, for example, is a copy of ZZ Top’s album Eliminator which has precisely three songs I remember: “Give Me All Your Lovin’,” “Sharp Dressed Man,” and “Legs.”

The last time I thought to myself “I really have to hear ‘Sharp Dressed Man’ right now!” was probably during the Clinton administration. The last time I heard it was probably before we invaded Iraq. And yet I have moved this disc — and several hundred like it — to nine different dorm rooms and apartments.

Mom and I were discussing Stuff over Christmas. She says over the last few years there’s been a general change in culture. We used to think the real thing was the object, and a computer representation was the copy. We ripped the CD, for example, but kept the CD because that was the “real” thing. Now we think of data as the real thing, and the physical object as the convenience copy.

Well, some of us do. I’m beginning to think of the physical object as a millstone.

Oh, sure. There’s romance to the liner notes. The feel of paper. The cover art. But there’s also the empty carapaces of paper lice, clouds of dust, and no freaking room to move. Paper is our least space-efficient storage mechanism. CDs aren’t that much better.

I’m going digital.