He may not be a psychologist, but Dennis Prager has simple common sense. He has an interesting opinion article on the overstimulation of our children:
Today’s young people have the ability to experience excitement more than any generation in history. Outside of school, excitement is available almost 24/7. MTV is exciting (MTV has done far more damage to this generation than has the tobacco industry); video games are exciting; the nearly all-pervasive sexual stimuli are exciting; MySpace (largely a human cesspool) is exciting; getting tattooed is exciting; piercings are exciting; many pictures and videos on the Internet are exciting. The list of exciting things many children experience is as long as there are hours in the day.
All this excitement in their lives bodes poorly for the future happiness of millions of American children. Real life, let alone daily life, will seem so boring to them that they will not be able to enjoy it. And more than a few of them will opt for lives of constant excitement, often in ways destructive to themselves and others.
This observation is very important. Our technological advances -which do produce some fantastic, wonderful results - can meanwhile be programming our children’s behavior Pavlov style. Eventually, unless there is some outside stimulus, the child may be incapable of functioning or responding. The effects of online written communication are readily evident in the inability of even college students being categorized as literate. At our local community college, if I recall correctly, 70% of the entering students require remedial composition…but I would bet that almost 100% text message fluently.
One other comment about the reference to MTV and the effect it has had on our society. Last night I was watching a rerun of the 1991 “Cape Fear” remake with Robert DeNiro. This presentation had comments throughout the movie in a bar at the bottom of the screen (remember “pop-up videos”?). During the pivotal scene between the stalking, sociopathic adult DeNiro character and Juliette Lewis’ naive, unconsciously sexy 15 year old, the kiss that results is one of pure evil and violation. How appalling to read in the notes that MTV nominated that scene as one of that year’s “Best Kiss” scenes! Is this another effort to “train” our children to accept any behavior no matter how inappropriate?