Customer Reviews

Virtuous Reality: How America Surrendered Discussion of Moral Values to Opportunists, Nitwits, and Blockheads Like William Bennett

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1 star:		(1)

 

 

I'm a parent of boys 9 and 12. I try to choose which movies they see, but they see the ones on my 'black list' at the neighbors down the street. When my older boy is on the net I wonder what he is looking at (usually it is the 'Hate Hanson' chat group, cheat codes for a computer game, or email to a friend). He likes 'gangsta rap' and I don't know why. I've spent a ton of time working on fatherhood issues and I do everything in my power to be a good parent. I am 50. This book is important because Katz reminds us: 1. the world is complex, more so than is comfortable for us to think, 2. human nature is resilient, more so than we may trust, 3. morality and conscience arise from the quality of day to day (minute by minute?) life in our families and communities, and they will not be undermined by dirty pictures or songs, 4. the modern media, internet and culture provide an incredible vista for our children, both awful and sublime, but an incredible amount of information by any measure. My 'take away' from Katz's book is to trust my children, and myself, in negotiating the new media culture. My job is to help my kid come to terms with the reality of our world, not to try to block it out. As Katz reminds me, it is not going to go away anyhow. This is a good book. I give it a full 5 stars because Katz is such a good writer. Some of Katz's prose jumps off the page.

From the title, you can tell that the author has a bone to pick. However, the book is less about the moral or political debate than about the impact of the "new media". Fortunately, given his credentials as a contributing editor at WIRED, it is not another hack essay full of silly utopian predictions. Instead, it is a thoughtful, provocative, and deliciously sarcastic take on the information revolution and its self-proclaimed critics.

Katz argues that the traditional media, from the NYT to CBS News, are under assault from a wide variety of new into technologies and new formats such as talk radio or Larry King Live. And, he believes, it is presumably Gen X that is taking the lead. The new media are not only democratic but highly interactive, offering anyone with an opinion an opportunity to communicate with millions instantly. There are the principal reasons, Katz believes, that the old-style media are slowly losing ground: their audience will no longer accept elite judgments about what is news and what is not.

This frightens a lot of people, the "mediaphobes". Parents fret that the internet exposes their children to pornography and offers of sex from predatory strangers, satanic cults etc. Katz argues that the attempt to shut down these media is an admission of fear, ignorence and simple laziness. This allows opportunistic demagogues, like the gambling-addicted William Bennett, to blame the media.

It is a great delight to read how Katz demolishes the demagogues calls for techno-restrictions and censorship as attempts to avoid the real issues, which are complex social choices in the end.

Katz' remedies are sober and simple: parents should lighten up and get involved in the new culture and media with their kids. This means rational discussions, negotiation, judicious limit-setting, and basic trust in our children. In this high-tech age, the old-fashioned wisdom of these suggestions is refreshing.

But Katz book offers more than that. Unlike the bland, old-style media he criticizes, his book is passionate rather than dryly "objective" (presenting both sides of view as if each were equally legitimiate, which is such a bore today). Nonetheless, he never goes overboard - he is outraged yet does not need to create political strawmen to trash and blame.

Also, there is a book within a book, looking at Thomas Paine as a new-media man of his age. This was a fascinating analysis that made me want to learn much more about him.

Warmly recommended. This book opened my mind to many new ideas.

In the same style as his Hotwired column Katz puts forth his arguments for the major media transition we're all in. I really enjoyed this book and the straight forward opinions Katz presents. For those who need a fresh outlook on new media this one's an eye opener. For those who embrace new media, it's still worth the read.

Katz's faith that his 15 year-old daughter has the savvy to negotiate the internet wilderness is a wonderful testament to the new generation which has to endure morals-preaching presidents of Oval Office sexcapade, virtuecrat Republicans who whine when their affairs are exposed, and a so-pious adult generation whose own morals are nothing for the young to copy. Katz's fury at the ridiculous hippie-prig anti-cyberspace unholy alliance of the '90s is worth the few facts on youth risks that he gets wrong. A great book, a needed message, and one ironically large in the post-Starr era.

This is one of those book we on the left both love (because it lambasts the right) and hate (because it is equally violent to our own beliefs). I must admit it is thought provoking but the thoughts it provokes are not very deep. It's a nice 2-3 hour read and you can put it down occasionally to watch MTV or whatever and not miss a beat. If you must read this book with a serious mind I would highly recommend a chaser consisting of Carl Sagan's last work "A Demon Haunted World" lest you become too enamoured of the idea that popularity means anything more than the lowest common denominator

The book was as good as it threatened to be. Next time, lte's give Jon a flamethrower before he heads to Washington D.C.He joins critics who take issue with "those who know better than you what's best for you". This has been a subtle theme of media critics from Rush Limbaugh's dittoheads to the Phi Beta Kappa Key Reporter.It is also with extreme, vicious pleasure I note that one of the three local Cleveland bookstores that did not have thisbook available have gone out of business. This store decided that it knew better than it's market what the market needed. I will not miss them

This book is controversial partly because Jon Katz says the kind of things that MORAL WHITE MEN fear. Net abuse blames societies ills on a tool, like blaming the pencil that wrote the nasty note. In first year art classes you learn, ART reflects LIFE. I don't find Katz unreachable in his intelligent argument. I get into his prose, I dig his way with the language and I admire his courage for spewing his own salve against the canker sore that is the current media. When it comes right down to it, Katz is one of us, by us, I mean the geeks who made the Net what it is. He's our buddy, he's our pal, he is saying what we've been saying for years! This is our world - and it screams with freedom. Remember Freedom? Read Jon Katz Virtuous Reality and you will

This book questions whether MTV, live television talk shows, the Internet, and computer games are corrupting America's values, hence disagreeing with those people who say these are negative influences. It takes an opposing stance to more than 3000 scholarly studies that have conclusively established such negative influences.

Only a third of the way through the book and I can already say it's one of the most sane arguments I've heard on the topic. Written in the Tom Paine essay style, it is refreshing both in terms of the thinking put forth and the expression of thought. If you read nothing else, read the "Media Mantra" Katz suggests, and escape the delusion that navigating the issues of new media is way too complicated. Hats off to Katz -- can't wait to read the rest of the book

okay Jon, since you feel that the internet and the direct communication that it allows is the be all and end all.... Read the book. Some interesting points but the fact that you haven't quite put together an overall philosophy or are not analytical enough allows for some inconsistencies. There are things you got right. If you truly understood why they are right, you wouldn't be spewing conventional wisdom truths that are false or are at least deserving of some more thought.

For example, if it is true that parents, not media, are the overall moral shapers of their children, that children with parents who guide them are not at great risk from media, than why to you stubbornly stick to the nonsensical idea that "Guns kill people" (and is this why you slam Charlton Heston [MOSES!]? who is, in my free speech opinion, not an idiot). The availability of guns is not the cause of violence anymore than media images of violence are. Lack of parental guidance, which causes people to grow up with an underdeveloped sense of morality, leads to violence.

Here's another idea to consider: those who rally for censorship on behalf of "the children" are covering their intentions to censor ideas or information that they feel the general public should not know, that the general public is too "child-like" to handle and must be protected from - this is another reason why we should all insist that parents are responsible for explaining the world to their children, and that everyone one else can deal with whatever is thrown out there.

As a polemic, the book is somewhat successful. (It got me thinking, although these are things I have thought about before and I'm not sure reading this book actually added anything new to these thoughts). However, someone who really believes that censorship is a good thing and that the new technologies are `evil', could probably find enough holes in Katz's arguments to read the book and not be swayed. Those of us who agreed with Katz to start with, may be somewhat affirmed. It easy reading, anyway.