The Humanitarian Side of Hoaxes

Is there such thing as an upside to an ill-conceived reality TV program designed to tug, and tug hard, on the heartstrings? You be the judge:

Some 12,000 more people have registered as organ donors in the Netherlands since a Dutch TV hoax that featured a "competition" for a kidney.

The Big Donor Show was revealed to be a hoax as the fake donor was apparently about to reveal her choice of patient.

But Dutch media say the number of people registering as organ donors has jumped since the hoax. The usual monthly figure is just 3-4,000.

On the one hand, none of the show's participants will get the kidney that was on offer for the run of "The Donor Show", which one has to acknowledge is a pretty cruel hoax, not to mention an insensitive topic for a TV show. On the other hand, someone on the organ donor list will benefit from the influx of new potential donors.

So, in the land of moral dilemmas, does the benefit outweigh the crime? I suppose it depends on where you sit. I have no idea whether these are potentially ethically tinged kidneys, corneas and hearts we're talking about. I suppose some of these TV producers might look into a transplant, as well.

twitter as text-based, mobile performance art

The esteemed blog Boing Boing pointed me to this link to what is allegedly the twitter output of Jenny Holzer. For those unfamiliar with Ms. Holzer, she is a multimedia artist who takes simple phrases and puts them in a context where they stand, unadorned of any context or meaning, other than the ones the reader applies to them. She is well-known for putting her short sentences on strips of paper and then plastering them around urban spaces, and also her work with LED light signs.

It's not clear if the twitter site is actually generated by Jenny or is an homage/parody of her signature work (such is the nature of identity on the internet = "question everyone"). But twitter, the social networking app with a maximum of 200 character spaces, is a natural platform for Holzer's short, stark phrases. A sampling from the site:

CLASS ACTION IS A NICE IDEA WITH NO SUBSTANCE 04:46 PM July 04, 2007 from web

CONFUSING YOURSELF IS A WAY TO STAY HONEST 03:50 AM July 04, 2007 from web

AN ELITE IS INEVITABLE 06:36 PM July 02, 2007 from web

So there is room for angst and self-reflection on twitter, and not just updates about drinking wine with friends or invitations to the movies.

Harry Potter and the Literate Kid

The big buzz today is the breaking news that Harry Potter, in fact, has not triggered a renaissance in reading for its young audience.

In what has become near mythology about the wildly popular series by J. K. Rowling, many parents, teachers, librarians and booksellers have credited it with inspiring a generation of kids to read for pleasure in a world dominated by instant messaging and music downloads.

And so it has, for many children. But in keeping with the intricately plotted novels themselves, the truth about Harry Potter and reading is not quite so straightforward a success story. Indeed, as the series draws to a much-lamented close, federal statistics show that the percentage of youngsters who read for fun continues to drop significantly as children get older, at almost exactly the same rate as before Harry Potter came along.

So kids who've enjoyed the Potter series may or may not continue to revel in the joy of texts in the future. This is a big blow to the aforementioned teachers and parents, who have seen Harry and his adventures as a way to entice children to put down the Wii controller or log off the computer and get with the (reading) program.

The problem is two-fold here. One, those who hold the best interests of children need to understand that while literacy is of course a critical, it comes in different stripes. Visual literacy, for instance. Technical literacy. A popular one taught in schools is computer literacy, which, like the continued emphasis on textual proficiency at the expense of other talents, smacks of a technical school orientation. Hey, if we can teach them PowerPoint at least, they can get an office job.

Frankly, don't bet on it. Technology is changing so quickly, shifting forms and collapsing on itself, today's presentation software is tomorrow's CD fodder for the shredder. We're much better off teaching students how to learn, rather than what to learn.

The second problem is that, while kids increasingly migrate to new digital media pasttimes, they're still required to understand language. You can't write a blog post or decipher a technical manual without it (it's hard enough to decipher as is). Furthermore, as we dive headlong into a digitally fluid world full of entertainments and education, it's equally important that we teach students how to assess the validity of a web page or an unsolicited email, and not to simply read it. It's time to move on from traditional educational strategies and recognize that reading is no longer king, but another talent at the multiliteracies table.

"Let the Parents Hold the Remote"

I nearly missed this report of a new congressional inquiry on how government might respond to children and the rising tide of violence on TV. Thankfully, the LA Times was on the story, and reprinted the testimony of Lawrence H. Tribe, a constitutional scholar at Harvard Law School.

Normally, anyone testifying on behalf of "broadcasters, cable operators and Hollywood studios" would be terrifically suspect -- it's natural to wonder if such people are on the take, because they often are. However, Tribe's testimony made good sense both from a constitutional standpoint, and from the perspective of raising our children.

Tribe's argument can be boiled down to a few key issues:
* regulating free speech of anything is against the 1st amendment;
* regulating speech considered offensive or inappropriate by many opens another kettle of fish. Who decides what is inappropriate for your children? You do, presumably.
* And perhaps the key portion of all this... the necessity for parental involvement in all aspects of a child's life, before they reach maturity. Fine, maturity is a moving target, but there's plenty of research on cognitive development to suggest that younger children depend on adult guidance and mentoring to teach them how to judge for themselves. If we teach our children well, they can spend the rest of their lives teaching themselves, and others.

Or, alternately, we could keep children in a plastic bubble of media avoidance, only to have them leave home at some point and collapse in a heap from the dizzying array of media options they'd had no time to acclimate to and learn about. It reminds me of a story I once heard about a Pacific Ocean island, idyllic in its flora and fauna, never exposed to any outside plants or animals (including man). But once man eventually found the island, dug its natural beauty, and decided to hang around a bit, the result was disasterous for the island itself. Having developed no resistance to outside invaders, the vast majority of the island plants died.

A sad story, and one biology will bear out.