From: Adrian Tymes (wingcat@pacbell.net)
Date: Wed Mar 07 2001 - 00:54:59 MST
Jim Fehlinger wrote:
> So what would *I* do if I had kids? Major dilemma. I have a fair
> amount of sympathy for my older friend's drug-addiction model of
> high-tech entertainment (though I was myself hooked long before I
> ever thought about such things), but I have no idea what could be
> or should be done about it, apart from a personal choice of
> "relinquishment" for oneself (and one's kids? I don't know!) such
> as he has made. In a free-market economy, given the average
> human's sweet tooth for storytelling and music, and the technology
> that makes possible the high-gloss production and mass replication
> of entertainment, you get Hollywood et al. In Britain, where the
> government has more control of these things, at least there's the
> BBC (though the BBC is often a step above what Dwight MacDonald called
> "masscult" in his 1960 essay "Masscult and Midcult", see
> http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0306802058/qid=983939657/sr=1-9/ref=sc_b_9/102-1083400-8739317
> it certainly doesn't rise above the level of "midcult"). If I
> had kids, I would probably adopt a laissez-faire approach just to
> keep life livable, sharing with them as many of the things I liked
> as they showed a taste for, and leaving the rest to chance and
> the public school system. But not without a twinge of guilt.
Actually, it looks like there's a solution earlier in your post:
> because its high-gloss
> professionalism, like the taste of refined sugar compared to that
> of a piece of fruit, cannot compete with the cruder product
So, get your kids hooked on "the cruder product". Get them to at least
try writing a few stories of their own, so they can appreciate from
personal experience the better-written stories, no matter what media
(TV, movies, classic books, freebie texts on the 'Net) they come in.
Then sit back and watch the systems evolve towards the criteria you set
them up to favor.
(Side note: you know you've been doing too much AI when you say it that
way. ^_^;;;)
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