My thoughts about it, are that some parents choose the 'hide out' method. They see something broken and so they want to 'hide out' from it.
ie; School. If public school sucks they'll 'home school'. Thus ensuring that the kid is book smart, but has absolutely no ability to deal with people other than pre-approved friends chosen by the parents.
ie; Television. If Television is mostly sex and violence or some bizzare admixture of sex and violence, totally turn it off. "We don't have a TV in our house". I hear that all the time by some proud ninny who thinks he is doing his kids a favor by tuning out the world.
The thing is, as time pushes forward, and cell phones become art and Television baloons to 3 gajillion channels you are basically taking the catholic school girl approach to life if you follow that method;
IE: Tell them NO NO NO NO NO for 18 years then turn them loose on the world.
Better to say "Yeah,there is 500 channels, most of its garbage, but some times you want to watch garbage. Here is why, here is how much is appropriate."
Teach them to find a balance, teach them to deal with it, rather than turn them loose on a world they don't understand with their 1950s leave it to beaver value system firmly brainwashed into their head.
There are basically two kinds of Americans;
1.People who are computer literate
2.People who fear technology
The computer literate people are pretty much anyone on this message board as an example. We come from every age group, every demographic.
The people who fear technology, sure there are the ones who take it to extremes and protest with signs that say 'computer is the devil', but that is not the ones I mean. The ones I mean are like my mom, who sent me an email one line at a time that read;
"This is really a neat thing.."
"But there is not enough room to type"
"it is really startin to b annoying"
"To send these, y do you like it?"
Because she was sending me email via the subject header of the email, as she hadn't figured out how to tab into the body area of the Email. Too afraid to ask a question, too ignorant to read a help file. And it simply doesn't come natural to her.
You ever meet someone who never learned to drive a car?
These people will not succeed in most places in America, because mass transit is a joke, and the reason they never learned to drive a car probably prevents them from learning the complex system of transfers and passes one has to memorize to use mass transit effectively.
There was however a time and age when women didn't learn to drive. it simply wasn't done in many parts of America. Hard to believe right?
well the same is true of Mass media and computers. That is why I feel like giving my child a heads up on the PC world, and saying "Yeah, this is what its all about. Hardee-Hardee-Har-Har. Yeah, some people enjoy making up reasons why Dick Cheney can beat up Chuck Norris. That is how we fritter away our time." rather than put her head in the sand, so that she gets shot out into a world that I predict will further and further have a rift between people who embrace technology, even if it includes "Thunder-Cock 3000", but we now how to take all that in stride and apply the appropriate level of apathy towards it, and the people who reject all technology and who must now get jobs as Preachers or something.
Also: Second Life kind of sucks.
I want to see how www.roma-victor.com does, you get to live back in the Roman Pax Romana age.
