Video Games
I read Boris Johnson’s piece on video games, and his theory that they are destroying levels of literature in young people. It’s nonsense, and Boris has no citations to any evidence that supports it. At least it’s Mostly Harmless compared to the "video games cause violence" statements thrown around by the likes of Hilary Clinton.
I’m sure that music halls, cinema and TV all endured this sort of media attack at one time. Rock and Roll, Punk Rock and coffee houses all did.
What causes this doommongering is ignorance of the subject. Boris Johnson is 42 and so would have been about 18 when I was playing Missile Command. I suspect that he missed out on a misspent youth of arcades, Sinclairs and Commodores that I and many of my friends did.
30 years ago, a Prime Minister who had once been involved in a rock band would have been completely unacceptable. 20 years from now, someone speaking out about the danger of video games will be seen as a bit of a twit.
RSS
May be he read The Economist, they at least mention it in passing in a report about children not reading enough:
http://www.economist.com/world/britain/displaystory.cfm?story_id=8462290
They don’t blame computer games though, at least not exclusively.
Armin,
I don’t read a whole lot of fiction now, but apparantly that’s quite common in men of my age group. But I read a lot of other non-fiction (funnily enough, the current book is by Boris Johnson).
In my early 20s, I did a lot of gaming. Things like Lemmings, Speedball 2 and Putty on the Amiga. But it was also the time I read a lot of quite heavyweight fiction.