9 January 2007
Ye olde videowe gamme
Listened to The Long View on BBC 4 today. The show centered around the similarities between this generation's view of video games and 18th Century's disapprobation of fictional novels. Both sparked fears of a distracted and decadent public more intent on self-entertainment than societal responsibility. I've often said that reading is as much as a consumer act as watching television, but I completely agree with the humorous warning contained in the BBC show's comparison. They spoke specifically of the novel Pamela (note that The Long View has been added to the end of the Wikipedia entry for Pamela), which apparently had a following in 1740 equivalent to today's popular TV shows.
This "fear of corruption" seems to me to be equivalent to the absurd concerns that television is getting so amoral that we'll soon be watching hardcore porn on prime time. If you can agree that banning navels and banning the word "pregnant" goes too far, then you've already been corrupted beyond what the 1960s would allow on TV shows.
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