NP - It's not the video games

[alice wellintown]

Assume that the famous/infamous Freakecomics claim about abortion and
crime is false; we can still take something useful from it, that is,
that poor unwanted babies often grow up to be drug dealers who live in
housing projects with their mothers, go to prison, and die young after
a life of neglect, poverty, and violence. But the violent enthusiasts
who shoot up schools are a bit more like Prairie's boy friend, still
poor and neglected, but white teenage wastelanders, or even affluent,
neglected teenage wastelanders who suffer from the latest ADHDism, and
try to fit in but fail, while the gangsters fit in to a family of
gangsters, their right of passage, not killing kids in a school, but
kids on the other gang or the betrayer in the family....but the root
cause is neither guns nor madness nor education nor parenting, but
poverty and neglect. Poverty? But the affluent kids are not poor.
Maybe they are. How we define poverty here is the rub. Just as the
fact that the Bronx has both the highest obesity rate in the nation
and the highest rate of hunger seems a paradox, the notion that
affluent and neglected white maniacs are impoverished seems to fly in
the face of what we think we know about poverty. BTW, poverty in the
world suffers from the same kind of misreadings.

Sure, the guns have to go. Sure, the violent games and TV and Media,
made for adults, need to be kept from children, but is poverty, a
swelling reality in our nation, that is at the root of these violent
lives. The white wastelanders often divert attention from the larger
chroic condition of the poor, and this should be an opportunity to
focus in the larger issue: poverty.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_oH8u9PxWJo

On Wed, Dec 19, 2012 at 8:07 PM, alice wellintown
<alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:
> Longitudinal effects of violent video games on aggression in Japan and
> the United States.
>
> CONCLUSIONS:
>
> These longitudinal results confirm earlier experimental and
> cross-sectional studies that had suggested that playing violent video
> games is a significant risk factor for later physically aggressive
> behavior and that this violent video game effect on youth generalizes
> across very different cultures. As a whole, the research strongly
> suggests reducing the exposure of youth to this risk factor.
>
>
> http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18977956
>
>
> A longitudinal study of the association between violent video game
> play and aggression among adolescents.
>
> Sustained violent video game play was significantly related to steeper
> increases in adolescents' trajectory of aggressive behavior over time.
> Moreover, greater violent video game play predicted higher levels of
> aggression over time, after controlling for previous levels of
> aggression, supporting the socialization hypothesis. In contrast, no
> support was found for the selection hypothesis. Nonviolent video game
> play also did not predict higher levels of aggressive behavior over
> time. Our findings, and the fact that many adolescents play video
> games for several hours every day, underscore the need for a greater
> understanding of the long-term relation between violent video games
> and aggression, as well as the specific game characteristics (e.g.,
> violent content, competition, pace of action) that may be responsible
> for this association.
>
> http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22040315
>
> Researchers have reported experimental evidence linking violent video
> games to more aggressive behavior, particularly as it relates to
> children who are at more sensitive stages in their socialization.
> These effects have been found to be particularly profound in the case
> of child-initiated virtual violence.
>
> http://yvpc.sph.umich.edu/2011/08/24/video-games-influence-violent-behavior/