With this year's backlash over the Janet Jackson Breast During the Super-Bowl (to be henceforth referred to as JJBDSB), it immediately became a priority for politicians everywhere to offer magic solutions to the less-than-simple struggle between censorship and safety. The fact of the matter is; while parents need to have the final say in what their children are and are not allowed to watch/listen to/play (expanding this to video games as well), if a grown adult wants to watch naked people prance around, listen to Howard Stern, and play the most violent and realistic of the video games, there should be no politician on the face of the globe telling him or her that content is not allowed. This is a free country (talking about the states, not to discredit any other free countries) and I can watch, listen to, and play any damn thing I want.
If politicians were really interested in protecting children, they'd be pushing for better technology. The V-chip is a good first step, and in a society where thousands of people are employed to design and develop technological gadgets that are becoming increasingly more mandatory, it should be no trouble to devise similar machines for the radio, the Internet, and so forth. We have the technology to put all the power of media output in the hands of parents, while at the same time allowing adults to view and hear whatever they wish.
The sad fact is this is not what our politicians want. They use "protecting children" as a front for something far more sinister. "Decency in the media" is a convenient cover story for censorship of a free society. Has anyone heard a piece of news as reported by Al Jazeera? Unless you happen to speak Arabic, chances are your answer is no. The government has made it a point to deliver news to us on a need-to-know basis, and the FCC is using "decency" as a front, opening the door for other media-controlling agencies. I for one would rather have a child see an occasional breast or hear a curse than have my "opinion" handed to me on a silver platter by the folks at CNN.
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A machine for the radio would be pretty tough for live broadcasts, but I suppose radio shows could be just as easily rated as TV shows. There are already quite a few programs to control what kids see on the internet, but I'm sure there's room for improvement.
The censorship issue is obsolete in this era, at least for the U.S. The U.S. government can only regulate on-air broadcasts. It is not clear whether local govenments can regulate the content of the cable channels they franchise, but the attempt would provoke a major court fight.
No one (except the consumers) can regulate satellite or internet broadcasts. I regularly get audio news from the BBC and the CBC (Canada) via the internet. You don't have to understand arabic to get news from Al Jazeera. They have a website at english.aljazeera.net. (I didn't see any audio feed, but I assume that text and pictures can also convey news.) Anyone who wants news from outside the U.S. (or video of Janet Jackson's breast) can surely get it with a little help from Google.
Parents who want to control what their children see can get excellent control via the web.
Whatever the emotional connotation of watching naked people jumping around delighted at their hormone rushes, the concept that sex is more psychologically disturbing than the total exposure of people of all ages to nightly brutality and murder strikes me as weird. The female breast, as sexually interesting as it might be, is designed as a feeding mechanism for babies and the concept that it would arouse any emotion in a child beyond hunger is one of the more psychotic capabilities of modern culture.
Personally, I think many adults should be classified as teenagers and should be monitored and controlled by a legal guardian. Many adults are neither accountable nor accept responsibility for their decisions and actions. I would like to include convicted criminals as being censured from sexual and violent content in all their media forms.
Regardless, using technology to censure violent and sexually related content from children should be incorporated into all media.
Other than the device being able to detect the number of people in the room and scanning their retina, I'm not sure how successful any system shall really be. Magazines, radio, newspapers, internet, movies, videos, DVDs, personal interactions with others, bands, drive-ins, iPods, MP3 players, laptop computers, ..., all have the opportunity to be absorbed by people under 18 years of age.
Many politicians would much rather control the population rather than to have the population control them.