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Wednesday, April 5, 2006
Neutrality question 
| | A partisan divide pitting Republicans against Democrats on the question of Internet regulation appears to be deepening. |
| | A Republican-controlled House Energy and Commerce subcommittee on Wednesday defeated a proposal that would have levied extensive regulations on broadband providers and forcibly prevented them from offering higher-speed video services to partners or affiliates. |
| | By an 8-to-23 margin, the committee members rejected a Democratic-backed "Net neutrality" amendment to a current piece of telecommunications legislation. The amendment had attracted support from companies including Amazon.com, eBay, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo, and their chief executives wrote a last-minute letter to the committee on Wednesday saying such a change to the legislation was "critical." |
| | Not being the wonky type, and failing to find where, in the maze of .pdfs and .docs and confusing filepaths that comprise the documentorium of the federal bureaucosm, the rejected amendment in question resides.... I'm hoping one of ya'll can help us with that. |
It might be normal, but it's also insane
| | Here's non-news that massive media consumption is bad for kids. Of course, we've been seeing this kind of stuff for years. Here's a study linking early childhood TV watching to ADHD later in life. Here's a story about how young kids get addicted to TV and computer games when they're barely potty-trained. Here's a review of several studies that show how watching violence on TV makes kids more fearful, aggressive and insensitive to the pain and suffereing of others. (By the time a kid leaves grade school, he or she will have been entertained by 100,000 acts of violence and 8,000 murders, it says.) Fairness: here's an NSF study that shows media consumption as a mixed bag. |
| | I think letting small children watch TV is like giving them Quaaludes. I also think kids in their most formative years need to interact with each other, nature, and themselves. They need to read and play and feed their curiousity about the world. They need to use their minds and their bodies to explore the Real World. |
| | Is the Net real too? I don't think anybody loves the Net more than I do; but I don't want my kid doing much more than using it as an educational resource every once in awhile. If you're going to get sucked into an activity, let it be reading a book, shooting baskets or playing an instrument. |
| | TV and computers have never been big in our 9-year-old's life. Starting when he was about 5, however, we began limiting his TV watching (and ours as well) to an amount that rounds to zero. As a result, his main indulgence is reading. He plows through several books a week. He has a delightful imagination and an adult vocabulary. Yet he still has plenty of time to play. It's amazing how much a kid can do if he or she isn't watching 6+ hours of tube a day. |
| | So, between those studies and my own experience, I think the time will come when we'll look back on massive media consumption by kids in the same way we look back today on ubiquitous smoking and blasé attitudes toward drunk driving. |
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