| Put Your V - Chips Up Your T.V. |
| Put Your V - Chips Up Your T.V. |
In late autumn, the first TV sets equipped with V-chips -- intended to permit parents to block unwanted sexual and violent imagery in TV programming -- are supposed to hit the stores.
Through years of broadcasting phobic and largely unsubstantiated reports about the dangers of pornography, violence, and hate-mongers, journalists actually helped politicians fabricate a major political issue out of the alleged threat new media represent for children.
Together, journalism and politics have created a climate of fear, even hysteria. TV ratings, V-chips, Internet-blocking software, and other censorship technologies have been legitimized. They've been foolishly -- even fraudulently -- advanced as an alternative to innovative education, parents' responsibility for their children, or actually teaching them how to be citizens of the Information Age.
By and large, technologies like the V-chip are so insanely unworkable they would be a joke if so many thousands of ideologues and nervous boomer parents weren't going to rush out and buy them. In many urban markets, there's up to 800,000 hours of programmable TV content, much of which changes every week, much of it unrated. The proponents of the V-chip would have it that pressed parents will -- in a nation where few people can work a VCR -- program their new TVs to be wholesome and pure.
Now the media will find themselves a casualty in the long battle between the advance of the digital age, which liberates children from the suffocating confines of their elders' sense of piety, and those who wish to control the movement of information and ideas.
The V-chips being sold this fall will, to the professed dismay and shock of the networks, allow parents to block unrated as well as rated programming. That means V-chips can be used to knock out news, sports, and advertising, if parents don't like them and find them too explicit or otherwise troublesome.
Broadcasters are stunned, arguing that their understanding with TV manufacturers and self-righteous antimedia advocacy groups was supposed to protect these three types of programming. It's okay to censor everybody else, but not them or their sources of revenue, for God's sake.
But consider this: When the news is about Monica Lewinsky's stained dress and offers live broadcasts of freeway suicides, there's not much on TV less worthwhile or more sexually and violently explicit than so-called journalism itself.
Consumer Electronics and Panasonic are among the first companies to offer V-chip-equipped sets that block both rated and unrated programs. They quite correctly point out that the pertinent Federal Communications Commission regulations state: "We will not prohibit features that allow the user ... to block programs that are not rated."
Now, ideologues can simply eliminate from their children's lives any opinions or images they find political, troublesome, or unwholesome. Liberals can block newscasts they consider conservative and vice versa. After years of clucking that the young don't care about news, we now offer parents the technology to bar access to news completely, so not only can Johnny not see any karate kicks or bare breasts, he will also be denied a sense of what's happening in the world beyond his living room.
The potential to block all advertising also threatens to undermine the entire economic underpinning of broadcasting. This is richly deserved: No entity ever brought more trouble down on its own heads than TV did, running countless mindless features on how to use V-chips and blocking software.
It's not clear whether parents will spend the extra hundred bucks or so to buy these V-chip-equipped sets. Since the ratings systems with which V-chips operate are voluntary, not mandatory, it's also unclear just how effective the chips will be at blocking the many channels available to cable subscribers.
This is heinous technology we're developing, a culture of censorship, ignorance, and avoidance that should be fiercely resisted, not advocated by anyone, let alone journalists and politicians.
What is critical is that people who believe in free speech, in the freedom to make individual choices, in the right of children to have some say in their access to information, understand that blocking technology is as noxious a censorship issue as the Communications Decency Act was.
Don't buy the V-chip or the simple-minded posturing responsible for its creation. Like Internet-blocking software, V-chips are a sham. They don't make children safe, they merely keep them from ever learning how to use media safely.
But if we keep endorsing censorship technology or looking away as it becomes more sophisticated and profitable, it will only become more efficient and versatile. The implications of this technology have always been enormous, though largely unappreciated. Censorship technology has already been co-opted by authoritarian regimes -- Singapore, Iraq, China -- to bring digital technology to those countries while stifling free speech.
In a democratic culture, we should support giving all of our citizens, young and old, access to a diverse range of ideas and opinions, not just the ones Mom and Dad or the pastor or rabbi embrace. Obviously, parents need to monitor and supervise what the youngest children see and hear. That's a far cry from giving ideologues the ability to screen out all information that could conceivably contradict their politics or expose their teenagers to other points of view.
We could become a nation of citizens who hear only our own voices, pay attention only to our own points of view, our families living in echo chambers that reflect only our values.
By any notion of democracy, this is a nightmare, not a virtue that makes kids safer. That it was lazy journalists, in bed with opportunistic politicians, who helped bring this mess about is a scandal.
Even journalists -- who should always be on the ramparts fighting for the free and unfettered movement of ideas and information -- are beginning to understand what the hackers who helped found the Internet have always known. But it may already be much too late.
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