The changes that have made it so much harder for Disney or NewsCorp to control what you see and hear are the same changes that make it very much harder for you to limit what your kids see and hear. A Tasmanian teenager can now discover – and, through social networks, find other people who are discovering – the poetry of Lorine Niedecker, the music of the Fat Tulips and the manifestos of climate change activists; she can also find encouragement, on the frightening ‘pro-ana’ (anorexia) sites, if she wants to starve herself to death. She can thereby redefine herself, if she likes, as a poetry reader, as a climate activist, as anorexic. Yet she is more likely to define herself just as she would have without the internet – by social class, by pre-existing tastes, by her schoolfriends.
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v32/n11/stephen-burt/always-on
No comments:
Post a Comment