Blogs

To start things off here, I have gone through some links sent to me by a generous commentator on my blog entry Desensitization and Media Violence as of This Time.  Unfortunately, I couldn't access one of them due to some membership that requires you to pay even just to look at it.  So, I would like to thank the commentator known only as Anonymous for the links.

When I printed the links and read through them, the content caused me to scratch my head.  It's mostly stuff about research claiming that violence in TV, movies, and video games not only increases aggression, but it also creates long-lasting psychological trauma, desensitizes viewers to real-life violence, and makes them less sympathetic to victims of crimes like murder, torture, rape, etc.

First of all, there was a study conducted two years ago claiming that violent video games are nothing more that desensitizing agents.  It involved 257 students playing two video games (Duke Nukem and Mortal Kombat) for 20 minutes and then watching a 10-minute clip of real violent acts.  Their heart rates and skins' reaction were measured before, during, and after both sessions, testing physiological reactivity.  How can anyone be desensitized to real-world violence after playing Duke Nukem or Mortal Kombat for only 20 minutes?   How about 1 hour, 4 hours, 6 hours, or 24 hours a day, 7 days a week?  What about playing the other games that exist out there like Final Fantasy, Halo, and Metal Gear Solid?  Or even non-violent franchises like Super Mario Brothers, Sonic the Hedgehog, and Crash Bandicoot?

The other thing I found odd while going through the papers is that according to a few studies, cartoons like Woody Woodpecker could increase boys' endorsement of aggressive solutions to problems and others like Alice in Wonderland or Beauty and the Beast create long-time fears of animals such as dogs, cats, or insects.  Personally, I find those types of claims to be just ridiculous.  They are only cartoons.  There exist good cartoons, like Looney Toons and Batman: The Animated Series, and there are also bad ones, such as Double Dragon and Darkstalkers (both based on known video game franchises).

Another thing I find to be more outlandish is that there was a study in 1999 which involved college students.  After viewing a violent film, according to the study, they became willing to hinder at other people's chances of getting a job.  How can watching a violent movie make people want to destroy someone else's hopes of future employment?  It's just mind-boggling.

But some of the studies that I looked at are the most appalling.  These studies claim that when exposed repeatedly to films that portray violence against women (pornography or not),  men not only become less sympathetic to rape victims, but also less able to empathize with those victims in general.  The studies also said that these men, who were a part of the studies in the first place, rated the victim as being less severely injured.  Even more revolting, I read a blog entry (also sent to me by Anonymous) which said that men who have seen violent pornographic films were given the story of a rape and asked what the sex offender's punishment should be.  These men much easier on the sex offender (who commit the crime in the first place) and 'responded that he should be punished significantly more lightly'.  These are the most absurd claims that I have ever read about in my life, in both methodological and ethical terms.

In conclusion, the studies which claim that all forms of electronic media are desensitizing agents make no logical sense and the alleged "scientific evidence" has no basis whatsoever.  If there is anyone who would like to share your thoughts with me on this, please feel free to comment.   You can also check out the links below (sent to me by Anonymous):

http://www.joannecantor.com/montrealpap_fin.htm  http://medialiteracy.suite101.com/article.cfm/theories_of_violence_in_the_media  http://www.bookrags.com/research/desensitization-and-media-effects-eci-01/  http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_hb5244/is_199712/ai_n21004340  http://www.uweb.ucsb.edu/~ker/scholarly_research.htm  http://instructors.cwrl.utexas.edu/jesson/?q=node/122  http://www.1up.com/do/newsStory?cId=3152445

Be sure to tell me what you think after reading them.

Esme Vos MuniWireless writes:

"The conventional wisdom among my friends who are Net Neutrality fanatics is that a change of regime will finally bring about tough net neutrality legislation, ushering in a Golden Age of cutthroat competition in the US market for broadband services, leading to faster speeds, lower monthly costs for Internet access, no throttling, no deep packet inspection, no blocking of applications and so on...."

Read More

No matter party is "in" , it seems there is little really done to end the buying and selling of legislation.

New Louisiana State Franchising Law On Hold
Groups Say Consumer Choice for Television Act Violates State Constitution
Louisiana:
Allegations claim the new law, dubbed Consumer Choice for Television Act, violates the state's constitution.
link

From the Alliance for Community Media List serve:

Reno, Nev.

Charter Agrees to Hold Off on Moving Public, Education and Government Channels

Reno, NV Charter agreed today it would not move Public, Education and Government
(PEG) channels over the next 90 days to allow the City of Reno and Charter
Communications to continue discussing the issues.

The City of Reno has agreed to hold off on filing for a temporary restraining order
against Charter Communications for the next 90 days.

On August 20, 2008 the City Council directed the City Attorneys Office to take legal
action to stop Charter from moving PEG channels from their current locations to
higher channel numbers on the digital tier. The channels were scheduled to move on
August 26, 2008.

After giving a successful Journalism Master Class here at WCCA this summer, Doug Grindle is back on the job reporting as a freelance overseas war correspondent.

Here is the rest of the story

Bad News For Afghanistan
by Doug Grindle
August 24, 2008

Kabul, Afghanistan - The war in Afghanistan forges ahead. But a new reality is setting in. Unfortunately, it looks like things are likely to get worse before the situation can get better.
How much worse? Attacks by insurgents are up by 40-percent over a year earlier in many areas.
NATO commanders are calling for more NATO troops. Forces are stretched thin in the farthest reaches of the Pakistan border areas.
Better equipment is needed. More mine-resistant vehicles are being deployed (though that’s not a miracle cure, as the high center of gravity on the vehicles on mountain roads can lead to roll-over problems).
More Afghan troops are needed. The Afghan National Army, with its 70,000 man force, is fighting the Taliban and a half-dozen or so other insurgent groups, including al Qaeda. This year the US has finally agreed to pony up billions more dollars to expand the army by another 50,000 men. By contrast, the police force for New York City is 48,000 officers.
But the biggest and most important change of all is one you won't see mentioned too often: suddenly Pakistan matters.
Up until now, the official line went roughly that the border was unsealable, and the war needed to be won inside Afghanistan instead. The strategy was to win the war by enticing Afghan villagers to reject insurgents after they crossed the porous border and arrived in the villages.
The army's plan is to offer better security, better local Aghan government and a heap of local aid projects (schools, roads and power plants) to persuade the villagers to side with the Kabul government. The war would be won despite the border areas over in Pakistan continuing to host terrorist sanctuaries.
Now Army officers say that strategy is probably not going to be enough.
"I don't think there will be a successful conclusion to the war in Afghanistan until there is a successful conclusion to the issues along the Pakistan frontier," said Brigadier General Mark Milley, the deputy commander of the 101st Airborne Division at Bagram, the unit in charge of many of the border areas.
That assessment bodes especially ill because Pakistan is, frankly, a mess.
Now that Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf has resigned, a weak government rules Pakistan.
The Pakistan military consistently loses its battles with terrorist in the tribal areas.
Al Qaeda and other militants are becoming more entrenched in the border regions.
The ISI, Pakistan's intelligence agency, helped blow up the Indian embassy in Kabul last month, according to US intelligence. Hardline ISI officers continue to help the terrorists, as long as they focus on destabilizing Afghanistan.
In short, the situation on the Pakistan side of the frontier is bad and likely to get worse.
Change in Afghanistan is slow, but its remorseless.
The US Army's strategy is an awfully slow one, because it takes literally years to build the roads, schools and hydro-electric plants that are the key to the plan.
Opposing the US, Al Qaeda is slowly putting more effort into Afghanistan, even as it scales back in Iraq. Terrorists are slowly but steadily getting better at killing western soldiers, by using roadside bombs and improving their ambush techniques. Casualties among western soldiers are set to be the highest ever this year.
Something needs to be done. Something is being done. But that something is likely to be dependent more than ever on what happens in Pakistan - where the American military is banned from operating.
So the latest news from Afghanistan is not good.

DG

OPEN LEFT:
Matt Stoller writes:
"Yesterday, if you listened closely, you could hear the sound of John McCain selling off the internet to his campaign backers, the cable and telecom interests. After being shocked by a 3-2 vote punishing Comcast for illegal behavior at the FCC, cable interests are freaking out and using every tool at their disposal to reinstitute discipline among wavering Republicans." More

Most people are aware, economic development includes more than event attendance. The attention given to nurturing and building an audience and a cultural community plays an important role which will ultimately produce economic spin off.

It is important to note that, on an annual basis, WCCA presents numerous music concerts and performing arts shows of various genres, programs that showcase artist, and other cultural institutions, and youth media programming, and educational events. Each week you are bound to find new TV shows on WCCA , featuring discussions with authors, craftspersons, poets, and promoting cultural events throughout the city, are all accompanied by in depth news coverage, in numerous languages, each going beyond the 60 second sound bite found in most commercial news segments.

The above reflects WCCA's proactive role in nurturing and inspiring artist and future artist, cutlural enthusiast and temps audience curiosity. Whereas the video content presented on WCCA TV is created by volunteers, video artist, writers, each show is a unique cultural event in itself. This is all only a small part of what WCCA accomplishes in its daily operation as it has for the past 22 and half years. WCCA volunteers and staff are building community and contributing to economic development through electronic media everyday.

The daily cultural events on WCCA TV are presented to over 55,000 cable subscribers in addition to hundreds of web subscribers each week.

At another level, WCCA averages about three open house ( in-house) cultural events per year. In 2006, WCCA celebrated it's twentieth birthday. We recorded an average of about 2100 attended these events over the last five years. This number does not include our television production classes and special workshops, volunteer projects and outreach activities off site, in addition to about an average of 60 persons per day foot traffic into our facility who participate in the creative process of television and community media production.

Public Access is important for a city, reaching into the homes of audiences contributing to not only a free flow of information and fresh ideas, it adds tangible vibrancy to Worcester's downtown core in a unique and inclusive way. WCCA TV is vitally important for Worcester and it's economic development.

FROM buisnessandmedia.org

Jeff Poor reports:

FCC Commissioner: Return of Fairness Doctrine Could Control Web Content
McDowell warns reinstated powers could play in net neutrality debate, lead to government requiring balance on Web sites.

There’s a huge concern among conservative talk radio hosts that reinstatement of the Fairness Doctrine would all-but destroy the industry due to equal time constraints. But speech limits might not stop at radio. They could even be extended to include the Internet and “government dictating content policy.”

Read the rest of the story here

Thanks to Chuck Sherwood for this:

You've
helped highlight just how little progress the U.S. is making in
high-speed Internet, and you can help push lawmakers to start turning
the situation around.

More than 230,000 of you took the speedmatters.org Speed Test over the
past twelve months. Today we released the second annual state-by-state
report on Internet speeds.

http://www.speedmatters.org/pages/state.html

The Speed Test, which measures the last-mile speed of your Internet
connection, shows that the 2008 median real-time download speed in the
U.S. is a mere 2.3 megabits per second (mbps). This represents a gain of
only 0.4 mbps over last year's median download speed. It compares to an
average download speed in Japan of 63 mbps. At this rate of progress, it
will take the U.S. more than 100 years to catch up with current Inernet
speeds in Japan. This is unacceptable for the country that invented the
Internet.

http://www.speedmatters.org/pages/state.html

The test results demonstrate the critical need for the U.S. to adopt a
comprehensive national broadband policy. As a first step, the Senate
should pass the Broadband Data Improvement Act (S.1492), a crucial piece
of legislation that will help our nation determine which parts of the
country have high-speed access and which do not. The bill would also
provide funding to states to increase broadband deployment and adoption.

Write your Senators and tell them you strongly support this bill:

http://www.unionvoice.org/campaign/s1492/iw3e3ux2a75n78t6?

The House of Representatives passed similar legislation last fall. It's
long past time for the Senate to act. The Broadband Data Improvement Act
will provide the research and the funding to help make sure every
American has affordable, high-speed Internet access. With an already
struggling economy, we can't afford to continue falling behind in high
speed broadband.

We need your help in the critical effort. Write a note to your Senators now:

http://www.unionvoice.org/campaign/s1492/iw3e3ux2a75n78t6?

Thank you for all your help in the fight for affordable high speed
Internet for all.

Sincerely,

Beth Allen
speedmatters.org Online Mobilization Coordinator