Virtuous Reality

This book is for nervous parents, neo-Luddites, kids, journalists, rappers, intellectuals, digital wanna-bes, Webheads, MTV users and banners, Beavis & Butt-head fans, survivors of the 1996 presidential election and buyers of William Bennett's moral fables. Here's some of what it's about:. Public discussions of culture and new media are hysterical, confusing and irrational. We have to start over. We blame our ascending, technologically distributed culture - music, TV shows, movies, computers - for crime, civic apathy and other social woes, while their complex causes and expensive solutions are ignored. Journalism has lost its moral moorings. Its new corporate owners have taken it far from its original purpose, as practiced by Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson, and transformed it into a timid, stuffy, "objective" and increasingly destructive entity. We need to understand the good things the information revolution is bringing and not just wring our hands over the bad. Consider the way interactivity is democratizing the spread of information. How the Internet is transforming science and research. How individuals can now carry on their own dialogues, instead of submitting to the suffocating dictates of three networks and a few newspapers. How citizens have the machinery to join in the discussions of political life. Children need more, not less, access to technology, culture and information. We have been led into a false choice - the old culture versus the new - by shallow politicians and manipulable journalists. Sensible people can pick what they want and need from both cultures, each offering vast amounts of both excellence and garbage.