Radio

When I first selected the postmodern miracle that is "Shuffle All" on my first (and last) iPod, I had the same reaction many people had: It's like my own personal radio station! Lewis Black described this feeling as akin to "the man who first created fire," comparing it unfavorably to the complex mechanisms necessary to switch between tracks on a record player. In 2002, the year the iPod and digital music as a whole really took off, SPIN Magazine dubbed the DJ of the Year "you", four years before TIME magazine made that sort of thing cool.

But it is the connection to radio that I find most interesting. Music radio plays an odd part in most people's pop culture repertoire. It continues to be the main source of learning what music is popular (surviving the relatively brief span of time MTV dominated that role) and yet most people seem to encounter it by chance, in the car or at the gym. It is not, like broadcast television remains (even if dwindling in that capacity), something people typically make a conscious decision to do other than to have something in the background. According to a 2009 study by the "Council For Research Excellence" (which, despite its innocuous name, is totally not a CIA front company), broadcast radio accounts for 79% of all audio media we encounter throughout our day (that includes both terrestrial and satellite radio). Here's the breakdown:

Exposure to audio listening falls into four tiers in terms of level of usage among listeners: (1) broadcast & satellite radio (79.1% daily reach; 122 minutes daily use among users), (2) CDs and tapes (37.1% daily reach; 72 minutes); (3) portable audio [ipods/MP3 players] ( 11.6% daily reach; 69minutes), digital audio stored on a computer such as music files downloaded or transferred to and played on a computer (10.4% daily reach; 65 minutes average use), and digital audio streamed on a computer (9.3% daily reach; 67 minutes) and (4) audio on mobile phones (<2% daily reach; 9 minutes).

The number for mobile phones is the only one I find suspicious, as everyone knows any phone that can play music has a max battery life of 8 minutes.

So nearly 10 years after digital media players became commonplace, and several years after USB ports became standard equipment in most vehicles, broadcast radio still dominates the listening spectrum. If you are not astonished by this, consider the lifespan of radio; it is second only to land-line telephones as the oldest standard for telecommunications in history. In fact, the only thing as shocking as radio's place on top of this study is the Silver Medal going to CD's--and even tapes-- which have only been around 30 years compared to the century of radio.

The study notes that only 10% of people listening to the radio were doing nothing else but listening to the radio--most were busy with work or some other activity (44% of radio listening is done while commuting). This is important if discussing the role of radio. I've recently become enamored with the website 8tracks.com, which allows users to upload a playlist and for others, even nonmembers, to listen in.  Of the Top 5 tags for user-created playlists, 3 describe an activity the playlist is made for rather than the music itself: "Sleep", "sex", and "study", in that order. MP3 players, as well, are usually found around the armbands of early morning joggers or in the cup-holders of early-morning commuters.

Broadcast radio is uniquely fit to play the role of background music: it's constant, free, and everywhere. In most radio markets, every station runs 24 hours. And despite the complete and utter scam that is HD radio, radio remains free and radio units themselves remain extremely cheap. Because of these two factors, radio is unavoidable. It's the most cost-effective and reliable method of tuning out the real world.

As it turns out, being the soundtrack to our own mundane thoughts and habits is good business. NPR, whose continued existence in the face of the 24-hour infotainment onslaught is itself astonishing, has shown steady growth over the same decade people turned more and more to cable TV and online sources for news. In a study published just this week by Arbitron, an international media analysis firm, weekly radio listeners increased by 1.4 million over the course of 2011. Again, we're talking about a century-old technology with absolutely no screen whatsoever growing against the same odds and technological waves currently crushing print media. Not bad for a box the size of a textbook shoved into my dashboard.

In an earlier post, I discussed the dying nature of television. While TV is quite passive, it does require the use of the eyes, which can be distracting when looking for something to fade in and out of during work, working out, or driving. Unlike TV, the radio transitions fairly naturally to portability. And as any music nerd can tell you, even a fully-loaded iPod can become fairly predictable. Radio can bring you traffic and weather, brand new music of nearly any genre, the oddball personalities of disc jockeys, and the sense that a million or more people could be listening to the same thing at the same moment you are (I believe sociologists call this term "community"). So while TV and magazines may die out to the Internet's persistent evolution, radio continues to be your oldest co-worker, turning down the chance to quit and still outpacing the new hires.

Citizens

The story of social progress in the United States tends to be the upward slope of who is defined as a "citizen." First, of course, it was white male landowners, followed by merely white males. 1865, the Civil War ends, and the 15th Amendment enfranchises all men, regardless of race or place of origin. Of course, the enforcement of the 15th amendment was paltry after less than a decade, but during that decade black men were elected to offices both national and local (Barack Obama was only the fifth black Senator, but one of three black Senators from Illinois). What followed has been called the racial "Nadir", meaning a time when race relations were cold and segregation, de facto or otherwise, became the norm. Literacy tests and poll taxes were specifically constructed to keep blacks and immigrants from voting (not to mention some extralegal methods of scaring people away from polls). The turn of the 20th century saw many states allowing women to vote with a national campaign resulting in the 19th Amendment. So, today, if you are a registered citizen of the United States, you can vote, free-of-charge. It's as close to universal suffrage as a modern society has ever been.

Of course, there are an estimated 17 million undocumented immigrants who, presumably, can not and do not vote (though many obtain an SSI card and driver's license, giving them the materials to register). Then there are the several million people below the age of 18 who work and pay taxes without representation. Followed closely by the 5.3 million Americans who have been convicted of a felony and, therefore, are banned from voting. And all of this relies on a School House Rock image of government and elections. The 2000 presidential election introduced an entire generation to the complex machinations of the electoral college, and the fact that three presidents (7% of presidents) in our history have won without the majority of votes. The electoral college is the lasting memorial to the fear of the masses found within the writings and opinions of that holy group, the Founding Fathers. Any AP Government student can tell you senators used to be chosen by state legislatures, not by direct elections, because the Senate is meant to be a collection of wise-folk to foil the raucous rabble of the directly-elected House. We do not elect our presidents by popular vote because we are not meant to, are not trusted to.

Then there's the way votes are obtained. Let's put aside stuffed ballot boxes. Let's put aside such prevalent and illegal practices such as caging, voter intimidation, and misleading voters as to the location and time of polls. Even if an election is run in the most legal manner possible, the undue influences of old power models and corporate institutions are unavoidable. Corporations have been making donations to political parties and PACs long before Citizens United made it fashionable. The old tactics, known as "soft money", are so called because their use can be decided by the party at hand (usually distributed amongst individual campaigns, even though it's not supposed to). Funding is not just needed to run a campaign; it is, in effect, the entire campaign. A common theme in primary campaigns is a candidate who may be polling well but cannot get the money to continue. Herman Cain ran into this problem. He started with a abysmally low funding and polling to match. As his polls went up, however, his funding did not. This is due to a vast number of reasons, but it essentially comes down to that mysterious quality we call "electability". Investing in a campaign is not like investing in a company; you can't collect and withdraw at your own whim, regardless of the companies long-term sustainability. A candidate needs to win in order for you to see returns in the form of favorable policy.

Now, as Mitt Romney tells me, corporations are people. We now have surpassed the goals of the Enlightenment and entered a new phase of granting civil rights to institutions. A corporation cannot go to the local high school or civic center and pull the lever for a candidate (yet). But why would it want to? We, as citizens, vote because it is the most direct way we can influence politicians. Most politically-active corporations have far deeper pockets than any individual and therefore can have far more influence than a single vote provides. By acting as the fuel for a campaign's spin cycle, a corporation can effectively become the campaign, as Stephen Colbert has been beautifully illustrating with his very own SuperPAC.

Citizens United did not grant corporations the enfranchisement people enjoy; it actually decreased the value and power of a single vote by forcing people to compete with wallets far fatter than we can hope to obtain. I started this post by talking about the increasing equality of enfranchisement through American history. Voting began as a tool for property-owning men to protect their property. But, because laws affect everyone and not just property owners, the right to vote, through 200 years of policy and evolution, spread to all American adults. Now we see that progress being pulled backwards. We could learn quite a bit from the European serfs of the Middle Ages. After all, who do you turn to when the bank owns your house, your car, your education, and now your government? We are beholden to faceless lords who face no regulations, no trials, and no elections. With such status, we can hardly be called "citizens."

Heroes

Penn State is an odd organization. Run much like a government bureaucracy, its inner workings are so mundane and boring they only necessitate analysis when something bad happens (and something bad rarely happens).

Over the course of the past 48 hours, through news reports, radio interviews, a newspaper, and some grand jury testimony, I got to know Jerry Sanduski. See, I'm not a fan of college football, and while a student at Penn State is expected to live and breathe and eat football, I found college football's rules absurd and inconvenient, its playoff system incomprehensible, and I couldn't get over the simple fact that there are too many teams and too many players (as compared to the NFL, which makes complete sense). So I had no clue who Jerry Sanduski was until about Saturday morning. Turns out he's the former defensive coordinator for Penn State, and also the proprietor of a charity called "The Second Mile". Turns out he also molested up to twenty young boys between 1994 and 2009, escaping capture due to the legal failure of Penn State's Athletic Director Tim Curly and Vice President Gary Schultz and the moral failure of head coach Joe Paterno and President Graham Spanier.

Let me explain Penn State a bit more. The response to these allegations has not been the angry retort of a pissed-off populace against a hated leadership. We like Joe Paterno. We like Graham Spanier. It's a little difficult to contort yourself into hatred against them, even though ignoring a possible sexual abuse claim is absolutely reprehensible. However, as thousands of Happy Valley residents and a few overturned vehicles can attest to, we need to learn that even our heroes can do wrong things and they need to be held accountable when they do.

There's been quite a bit of talk about the inherent "goodness" of Joe Paterno. Says one local editorialist, "All of these men that were involved, excluding Sandusky, are undoubtedly good men." Really? They may have ignored a reasonable and prescient claim of child rape in the interest of protecting a goddamn football team, but aside from that, I'm sure they are all great men who love their wives, Jesus, and America. In fact, one could say that through the annual Four Diamonds fundraiser THON, Penn State is one of the most philanthropic universities in the country. However, a person's morality is only relevant when acted on consistently. Sure, Joe Paterno and Graham Spanier had the potential to be good men in this situation, but they summarily failed.

Let me relate a story. At my high school, an English teacher was fired for carrying on a lustrious and illegal love affair with a male student. The teacher was well-liked by students, relatively popular amongst teachers, and a fairly well-known personality even for those who did not have her in class. While disgust for what she did was fairly widespread, it was difficult for both faculty and students to admonish her outright because of their allegiance to her as a mentor and as a friend. The relative badness of her actions did not match up with our belief that she was, inherently, a good person, creating a degree of cognitive dissonance.

This emotion, fellow Nittany Lions, is called "disappointment". Disappointment in a school which prides itself on the moral high ground. Disappointment in a leadership we trusted appearing to be the worst kind of self-interested organization not even the worst cynics could have predicted it to be. Disappointment in a wholesome folk hero making a large and consequential mistake at the expense of the well-being of 9 children and counting.

Let us not, however, lose sight of the actual villain. Joe Paterno is a nationally-renowned celebrity and the face of Penn State, so yes, he has unfairly become the face of this controversy. But, as allegations become far more undeniable for Sandusky, the selfish evil he unleashed on the childhood of these people, many of them grown adults now, over the course of 15 years is of the worst kind and no human with a conscience will blink if he never sees daylight again. That Sandusky is a bad person is inarguable and self-evident. But, as a famous quote (often misattributed to Edmund Burke but actually from a Russian film narration) goes, "All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing."

Materialism

No, not that materialism. I'll let neuroscientist David Eagleman explain:

"The materialist viewpoint states that we are, fundamentally, made only of physical materials. In this view, the brain is a system whose operation is governed by the laws of chemistry and physics-- with the end result that all of your thoughts, emotions, and decisions are produced by natural reactions following local laws to powest potential energy. We are our brain and its chemicals, and any dialing of the knobs of your neural system changes who you are."

The Eagleman book that quote is from, Incognito: The Secret Lives Of The Brain, is a journey into the subconscious which serves as an excellent introduction to the fascinating world of neurobiology. When you are an atheist and are identified at a gathering as such, you are often asked very long-winded questions about the creation of life, the cosmos, and the soul by those with a religion to answer these questions for them. Unless you are a scientific genius yourself, it can be overwhelming to face people who feel it is your responsibility to provide the answers to questions it has taken science millenia to even come close to solving. So it helps to have a book like Eagleman's to explain the science in a clear, understandable, and entertaining fashion.

The above quote about the philosophical view of materialism, while never mentioning the soul, is a direct retort to any worldview which attempts to explain human behavior as having an amorphous, indescribable engine behind it. Indeed, all human behavior, from crying out of the womb to drafting a will, is driven by the baseball-sized glob of neurons and biological gelatin behind your forehead and under your scalp. This view of humanity is, from a theist's standpoint, rather unpoetic and unsatisfying. Guess what? I don't care. The correct explanation is not the one that is most settling, or the most comforting. Galileo knew this when he endorsed the Copernican view that the Earth revolved around the sun, not the other way around. The history of science can be described as diminishing the value of human life until we are only slightly more important than the bacteria under our feet. I'm sorry if this is an unsatisfying view, but the universe does not exist for our own satisfaction.

What the materialist worldview presents is the idea that we are merely the functions of physical systems. Throughout Incognito, Eagleman raises examples of how dependent our judgement and actions are upon our brains. This is not to say that the scientific world currently has explanations for every perceptible action we commit; the key word is "currently." Are there some things science may never discover? Certainly (though particle physics seems to have a lot more questions to answer than neuroscience). But this is not reason to chalk up mysteries to fairies, gods, or spirits. Holes have been left in science for centuries that are just in the past few decades being filled. The important thing to remember is not to pretend we know the answers to things we (currently) do not.

The soul is a comforting thought. It attaches meaning and responsibility to our actions and emotions. The organ that makes your heart tick on time, that reminds you how to ride a bicycle, that allows you type while looking away from the keyboard; that's the brain, most people say. But how I love my partner, how I feel about God, my morals and values and virtues; those are the surely the soul. If you agree with this, you're creating a needless agent for aspects neuroscience already can explain with the brain. Occam's Razor 101.

The main opponent to materialism is merely human emotion. It isn't a pleasant thought to believe that all that you love, all that you hate, all you distrust, and all you save are the products of chaotic and fragmented electrical signals. However, it isn't just our emotions that are trapped in the brain. All those physical machinations actually are ourselves. The brain is not a tool we use to drive the body because we are that tool. Your ability to read this article, your forming opinion of the topics I bring up, and any response you may give are all the products of an unimaginably-complicated physical organ. And when your brain stops, so do you.

Again, this isn't the happiest worldview, but there is beauty to see. Consider the lowly brain functions of ants, which express little emotion other than hunger and fear. Or consider the aforementioned bacterium and single-celled organisms. They have no brain to speak of, no manner of perceiving the world other than simple sensors which guide them towards proteins and lipids. Millions and millions of years of evolution has produced this deceptively-simple organ inside our heads which actually stores the full range of human action and reaction. The decision to get a venti or grande is handled by the same organ which tells you to stay or leave the scene of an accident, respond or ignore an attractive person who confronts you, or start a nuclear war. All the majesty and anger and awe we see in art, poetry, and music is actually a natural product of a handful of jelly inside your head. Now that's satisfying.

The Internet Will Not Save You

I spend a lot of time and space on this blog defending the Internet as a crowd-sourced, masterful network which can hold and make available all the information we as consumers, citizens, and people would ever want to know. But if I've given the impression that the Internet is solely a revolutionary land of gumdrops and kitten videos, you'll have to forgive me. As I've said before, the Internet is merely a tool to make your life easier. Sure, it allows us to see the evolution of ideas in real-time, and its spread to autocratic dictatorships have proven information to be the most important weapon a people can have. But outside of philosophers and revolutionaries, it is merely a merger between the people who brought you Three's Company and your phone company. The Internet is not your existential savior. The Internet is not your friend. It will not provide meaning to your dull, repetitive life.

In Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury asks us to imagine life without meaningful literature. Characters in the novel are lulled into a catatonic state of interaction when they turn on their "walls" to join their "families", a thin approximation of televisions and sitcoms. The Internet is fulfilling this role in a unique twist Bradbury could not have seen coming. Rather than letting our mental states wallow in the Brownian motion of bad fiction, the Internet has been turned inwards. Instead of analyzing the social circles of JR and Sue Ellen, we spend hours a day pouring over our own friendships and connections. Take this graph from Nielsen, those who watch the watchers:

By nearly every measurement (the exception is bandwidth usage, which Netflix dominated pre-Qwikster), social networking is the number one use of the Internet. Social networking can mean a lot of things; these studies merely track what websites users spend their time on, not what they do on those sites. So according to Nielsen, there's little difference between flirting with a classmate and planning Occupy Maine. But what does it say about the Internet, the world's largest free library, that most of its users are too busy ogling their ex's photo albums to take advantage of the historically significant liberation of information?

Arguments about the eventual downside of artificial intelligence seem to focus on computer's gaining independence outside of mankind. But even the highest forms of artificial intelligence need input from a human and output to another human to be of any real use. All computers are, essentially, telegraphs, receiving the message of one user and transmitting it for another. So it makes perfect sense that the Internet, the closest we have come to a "world brain", would be spent on the same banalities we use our phones for (and the mergers of those two worlds was only inevitable).

Facebook and, to an even greater extent, Twitter have earned quite the reputation in the Third World for allowing the easy and free spread of information. First recognized in 2009, Twitter's use as an activism tool gained a foothold during the Iranian protests against that country's most-certainly fraudulent elections. The Arab Spring of this year has also seen social networks put to use when organizing protests. Twitter was seen to have played such a large role, co-founder Biz Stone was in the running for this year's Nobel Peace prize (the real prize will come if he ever finds a way to make money off of Twitter).

That said, the only revolutions most Facebook users are igniting are are fake campaigns to end child abuse. This fairly recent phenomenon, known as "slacktivism", centers on pointless online efforts to "contribute" to social or political campaigns. No, changing your Twitter profile to a green background did not help Iranian protesters. However, I'm fairly certain most participants are aware of this. Signing an online petition (which, some people need to be told, is completely and utterly useless) is less a solid statement of activism than it is a sign of solidarity like, say, wearing a black armband to class to protest the Vietnam War.

Internet action, as I've said before, is not the same as real action, and it would appear most members of my generation know this. However, becoming too reliant on online tactics can make us forget what tactics really work. The Far Left has been trying to force economic justice as an issue for years, and while their online activities have been numerous and plentiful, the discussion wasn't changed until people began protesting in a real and noticeable manner. The Internet is great for the spread of information, but if that mindset closes when you leave the office chair, then it can all be for nothing.

Class

In 1984, my favorite love story, George Orwell's hyper-secure state of permanent warfare and delineated economic class is bottomed out by the "proles" (short for proletariat), an underclass deemed too stupid to worry about the evil machinations of "the Party." In this dystopia, the slogan "proles and animals are free"  dictates the government's attitude towards the poor; they, like animals, lack the decision-making skills to abuse their freedom in any meaningful way and therefore are not a worry of the Party. The novel's hero, Winston Smith, calls the proles the best hope for freedom. "Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious."

The idea of a clueless but easily influenced working class is not a new one. Like most of 1984, it is based on the ideology of 19th-century conflict theorists like Karl Marx and Max Weber. Decrying the liberalism of the bourgeoisie (middle-class), Marx stated " the proletariat alone is a really revolutionary class." Fear of the working class can also be seen even earlier, amongst American intellectuals in the wake of the 1776 revolution. John Adams and other founders were concerned about "mob rule" in a democracy (hence why Senators were chosen by state legislatures, not elected, until the passing of 17th Amendment), leading to a property requirement for voting. The reason for this is largely the view of the poor as uneducated and easily influenced. If the poor can be guided towards a worldview that congratulates their hard work and romanticizes their poverty, they can lead movements of massive social change, for better or for worse.

The last 40 years have done quite a bit to change this factor in the Western world. College, after the 1950's, was no longer the elite club of intellectuals and rich offspring. In a post-Belushi era, college is a right of passage in the United States. And as long as jobs and credit were flowing freely, this system could sustain itself.

However, as banks deny more and more loans and jobs remain stagnant, the "Lost Generation" of today is far from undereducated. They are, in fact, anchored by the debt they were told to garner in turn for an education. However, the tools to win in this system have failed to prove effective, but they also allow us to understand why we're poor, why our choices are so limited. The proles are no longer rural simpletons; they are a people raised on middle-class dreams, educated by the best universities they were willing to go into debt for, and thrown into a reality which has no need or room for the education they were given.

The phrase "we are the 99%" reveals two things about Occupy Wall Street as a class movement. First is its effort to identify not just as a majority a la Nixon's "Silent Majority", but as a movement which means to represent nearly everyone. It is an "us-versus-them" game, and unless you own a bank (or two), they are on your side. Second, OWS is chiefly a movement about class consciousness. The power corporations have over the middle and lower classes is astonishingly staunch and far older than Citizens United or the 2008 collapse. By breaking away from these outdated models of upper, middle, and lower class (to say nothing of lower-middle and upper-middle class), OWS is seeking to change the way we view class structures. It says to the middle class, "you are merely luckier than I am. We face the same forces in a world designed to benefit the ultra-rich."

In the context of how we define class and the American Dream, this is an astonishing message to build a movement around. Protest movements tend to need individual targets, like Mubarak or Obama or Lyndon Johnson. But to focus less on individuals and more on the very method we diagnose our economy, the very looking glass we peer into, makes the popularity of OWS very unique. OWS is expressing the worldview of most Americans, that our society is heavily bent towards old-money and the well-connected. It is a populist message, and public perception does not equal reality, but a new generation of economists and historians is being raised and educated in this social climate.

It is possible, perhaps even likely, that social commentators are slapping a sticker on OWS too soon. But even if Zucotti Park is emptied tomorrow, the measure of OWS' success will be the public debate. Sadly, the public debate is largely controlled by the attention-deficit media. Admittedly, it's hard to focus on the drum circles and smell of hemp when dictators are being thrown into the frozen food section. But the effect OWS has had, putting income inequality and financial justice on front pages around the world, was precisely its aim. They do not have specific legislative hopes or demand the resignation of any official (at least not collectively). This was a movement by the proles to educate the proles. OWS recognizes the limited effect they will have in the halls of Congress or on the trading floor. The real victory is educating the rest of us, the 99%, about our place.

Television

I just finished reading a 1994 Washington Post feature entitled "Group Portrait With Television", an anthropological review of a suburban family and their television habits. It's odd to remember that television, a dull stream of American consciousness compared to the netherworld of the Internet, was once the target of PSA meetings and parental organizations. The manner in which the article neatly details the exact schedules of the family's viewing habits, down to the size of the consoles (19 inches?! Slow down, America) and the rooms in which they watch, seems to be doing so for shock value. How could a family be okay with watching Maury Povitch every day? The father of the Delmars, the family which serves as the subject of the portrait, has an interesting take on it:

"I just don't buy it that too much TV is bad for you," says Steve, 37, the chief financial officer of a company that makes automated telephone answering systems, who gets home from work around 7, eats dinner while watching Dan Rather and Connie Chung, settles down in the den by the 19-inch Sony, watches a few hours of sports, goes back to the bedroom, turns on the Hitachi and falls asleep with it on because Bonnie can't fall asleep if it's off. "Nobody wants to admit they watch television -- it's got the connotation: 'the boob tube' -- but all these people, what are they doing? I'm not sure if they have any more intellect. It's not like they're all going to the Smithsonian or anything."

America before OJ. America before Monica. America before Osama.

Indeed, television was subject to more scrutiny by parental and medical organizations than any media source before it. As the Nielsen rating system revealed Americans to watch 7.5 hours of TV a week (the number is closer to 6.5 currently) and specialized channels (CNN, ESPN, Nickelodeon, The History Channel, The Food Network) began to dominate more bandwidth, television was king of the 1990's. Bill Clinton, in his 1992 campaign, made a point of supporting V-chips, a now archaic technology which attempted to allow parents to block certain kinds of programming. Parents in the article are horrified when a child health specialist holds a seminar at the local elementary school to espouse the dangers of too much television:

She turns on the TV and shows a videotape, in which the announcer says that "in a typical television season, the average adolescent views 14,000 instances of sexual contact or sexual innuendo in TV ads and programs."

She turns on an opaque projector and shows a chart that says: "Most children will see 8,000 murders and 10,000 acts of violence before they finish elementary school."

"They won't do any other thing, other than eat or sleep, that many times," she says. "That's what we're teaching them. It's okay to kill 8,000 people. It's okay to hurt or maim 10,000 people. It's okay. TV does it, so it's okay."

While true that we have the vantage of hindsight, these assumptions about TV were misguided even then. In a post-Columbine world, we now know that media does not turn otherwise healthy children into killers, be it music, TV, or video games. But it was wrong to assume it was harmful to begin with. Charles Manson was inspired by The White Album, which isn't even the most violent Beatles album. Killers are inspired by their own psychosis, not what they saw on the evening news growing up. Plus, children are surprisingly capable of separating reality and fiction, as well as separating good and bad within fictional narratives. Not to mention the facts and figures given here are pathetically inconsequential when compared to the trove of data the Internet provides to children. The fact that somewhere in the world a child's first cultural memory is watching the bloodied body of Muammar Ghaddafi be paraded around on the hood of a truck on Youtube is not, admittedly, comforting. But the medium is certainly not to blame. You might as well blame weather patterns for thunder scaring your children.

In the interest of full disclosure, my childhood was painted with the cold glow of a 13-inch Sanyo which followed me from house to house. My mother was skeptical of television, barring me from watching The Simpsons and, later on, South Park, but she never shirked from letting it hold my attention through one of her late-night shifts as an ER nurse and, later on, her bed-ridden depressive spells. One of my great childhood memories is of sneaking out of bed when my dad would come home late at night, watching Conan O'Brien ward off lizards a guest animal trainer had brought on or flirt with Heather Locklear. Later, my sister became an MTV obsessive, watching TRL during its Carson Daly heyday. As we entered adolescence, she and I became obsessive fans of Friends (though things got a bit silly after Chandler and Monica married) and Mad About You (no comment). As she entered high school and adapted to something called a "social life", I attached myself to Batllebots, literally the perfect show for twelve-year-old boys. Battlebots, some may recall, came on just before South Park. As my mother's mental issues became more severe, her attention to my television habits became more distant, so I was able to sneak in a few episodes after my nightly robot-fightin' time. This grew into watching what South Park led into, The Daily Show, which has been my favorite cable show ever since (in the words of David Rakoff, "I would drink Jon Stewart's bath water").

So where's television now? I am certainly not the only young person eschewing a cable box for a high-speed modem. Television still exists in the form of streaming services, such as Netflix, Hulu, and less-than-legal options, but sitting down in front of the television for hours at a time is an old habit that died hard. Indeed, those who still do watch television usually do so with laptop or some other device wiring them to the Internet; the television is background noise while the Internt requires your attention.

The Internet used to be plagued by PTA horror stories of online predators, hackers out to steal your identity, and more recently, cyberbullying. Compared to television, though, the Internet has largely outlived these negative connotations. The viewing habits of the Delmar family are quaint compared to an era of dinner table Youtube sessions. So why is it the Internet more solidly secured itself as a safe, recreational source?

Perhaps it's the practical use of the internet. It's less comparable to a TV than it is to a phone, putting us in instant contact with friends, family, and colleagues. We can now pay bills, get an insurance quote, research local mechanics, and wish Grandma a happy 80th birthday all from the same browser window. Whereas TV is such a passive activity, the Internet is also a tool. The more legitimate uses have begun to outweigh the frivolous.

With each new technology comes fears of its overuse. This is merely a naturaly reaction by a society to major change of any kind. But when new technologies prove themselves more than something to stare at, these fears are washed away in the face of ease and convenience.

Is TV doomed? I'm not one for predictions. If sports and news fully engender the Internet on to television's last stronghold, live programming, then what purpose will television serve? TiVos trap you to the couch and game consoles could turn television sets into computer monitors. Much like newspapers, if television wants to survive, they'll need to work at providing their products online in a comfortable, easy manner. Hulu certainly has mastered this game, obtaining streaming rights to hit shows from three of the four major networks. Hulu's ad system is flawless, even allowing you to switch from a commercial irrelevant to your lifestyle to one more fitting. Even their premium service, Hulu+, almost seems worth it (almost). Hulu is perhaps the best example of an industry responding to technological change (other than the music labels success at converting their industry from CD singles to Now That's What I Call Music). Mergers of television and the Internet which have come from the opposite direction have had mixed results; Google TV is largely a flop while Apple TV may be due for a post-Jobs reboot.

Nearly thirty years after the debut of MTV and the world still stands. The parental hysteria of the 90's, laughed away by Nielsen families like the Delmars, was mostly a first-world problem of a country at its most first-worldly. While the Internet does pose some actual dangers to children and parents alike, one can take solace in the story of television's rise from an appliance to a dangerous mind-melting devil then back to an appliance.