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According to an article in today’s NY Times a Kaiser family Foundation study has found what the study calls “the average American youth” between the ages of eight and eighteen spends seven and one half hours a day, a day, online. This is not to say these young people are only sitting around surfing the web. More likely they are listening to music, downloading and playing interactive games, conducting searches, etc.

The study found that this average use had increased over the past four years from six and one half hours a day to the present usage time of another hour. Indeed, the findings are said, in the article, to have shocked the researchers. The researchers did not believe it was possible for young people to spend even more time online than they had done in the 2005 study.

By the way, the article also noted that the seven and one half hours did not include the time spent on texting and talking on the cell phone. These activities account for another two hours, one and one half hours for the former and one half hour for the latter.

Published last week in Wired.com is an article about the growing “addiction,” among adolescent Chinese, to the internet. This supposed addiction is frightening Chinese parents. So much so that “rehab centers” have opened to treat afflicted youth. The centerpiece of this article is the sad story of one young Chinese who was committed to such a facility and died from the experience. Indeed, according to reports, “counselors” beat the young man to death while administering “psychological” methods to “cure” him of his addiction.

Taken separately, either of these articles stands as a clear statement of how the internet and its various manifestations are changing world wide societies. Taken together they make an interesting comment on how different cultures are confronting this “scourge.”

The United States and most western countries, whether developed or undeveloped, are assimilating the technology into the culture. Many Far Eastern cultures and Middle Eastern cultures are attempting to “push back” against the societal changes the technology not only makes possible, but insists upon.

There is no reason for western nations to congratulate themselves about any of this. The truth is, as much as anything else, the dramatic shrinking effect the world wide web and the attendant technologies have birthed have as much to do with rising tensions between western culture and non western cultures. These technologies make us well known to societies that are, in all ways other than usage of these technologies, culturally medieval.

The allure of the modern to the youth of more traditional cultures is threatening to those cultures. Further, the open access to information and communication between those traditional cultures and the West makes the old monopoly on information flowing to young people impossible for the old guard to maintain.

Any parent of a teenage girl can sympathize with the traditional leadership of these cultures. It is terribly difficult for any parent to make sure a teenage girl understands she is so much more than her body. Everything, other then her parents, and maybe a church, if there is one in the picture and that church is not run by some weirdo, she sees and reads and hears from the popular culture in the West tells her she is primarily valuable because she has that body.

Imagine how threatening it must be to have all your values challenged 52/24/7. Imagine how difficult it must be to lose the control over information flow to the entire society. It is the insecurity of this situation that drives the old guard to madness.

Now, don’t go accusing me of being an apologist for the nutcase Islamists and the other old men who seek to maintain a control over their societies that is no longer possible. Let me be clear, there is no excuse for them. They are fighting a losing battle to stop the tide from coming in and causing much useless damage in the effort. Unfortunately, these gentlemen lack King Canute’s insight. And, to be sure, the vast majority of the dangerous nutcases around the globe are men, not women. (The women may be every bit as nutty as the men but the traditional societies in which they live limit their leadership opportunities. Therefore, their opportunity to be barbaric savages on the scale they might like is similarly limited.)

When politicians and citizens lament and wring their hands and wail out, “Oh, why, oh why, do they hate us?” This is why. We are allowing our technology and our open and easy ways to culturally seduce their children.

They don’t hate us because we consume a third of everything in the world. They don’t hate us because we shore up worthless dictators, kings and other “leaders” so that our sweetheart deals to take their natural resources and labor and whatnot will remain in effect. Nope, that is not it at all. It is simply that our music makes the young girls wiggle and squirm and makes the boys think of things that good boys should not be thinking of.

I make no apology for this. It is the inevitable march of history, assuming we can keep the nukes away from the crazies long enough for freedom to “ring” in enough of the youthful libidos of the Middle East and Far East. However, it is foolish to ignore what is, at once, both our greatest, inadvertent aggravation to these people and our greatest weapon against them.

Yes sir, the key to a victory in Afghanistan is fast food and rock and roll. Ditto in Iraq, Saudi Arabia, China, North Korea and everywhere else currently clouding our sunny horizons. Of course, even after this is successful, there will remain powerful residual resistance to this McDonald’s aggression policy. Look no further than France for confirmation of this.

We need to be aggressive. What we need is to step up our assault on traditional cultures. Particularly where women are still subjected to male domination, we need a full frontal assault. There are any number of truly powerful women in the western world. Women who possess all kinds of power, financial, creative, cultural, political, bureaucratic, personal, hell, you name it, we got women who possess it. And, like the saying goes, “When ya’ got, flaunt it.”

Everyday when Mullah Omar wakes up it ought to be, if only figuratively, to Beyonce or the latest Playboy Bunny or, at the very least, some reasonable high quality porn video. Until the War on Terror settles down, there ought to be a moratorium on male ambassadors to any predominantly Islamic country. Each of these ambassadors should be female and each of them should have a young, strapping,  heterosexual, male secretary with whom she is dominantly friendly in public. All western domiciled companies doing business in the Middle East should have their local offices headed by women. We should send the various NFL cheerleader squads on cultural exchange programs to the countries in the area.

This is just the start. There should be a specifically designed program of subsidized fast food restaurant chains built all over North Korea. Anybody that wants a burger and fries should be given them. Same with fried chicken. After six months or so, close them all down, then see what happens. I’ll bet it will work out just fine. We don’t open back up until they shut down the nuke plant and give us free and complete access to investigate in the future. Then, we open back up and leave them open unless the leadership gets squirrelly again. Then, we shut all the joints back down and bring the leadership to their knees.

Similar specific programs can be devised to deal with Iran and anybody else who gets in the way of American cultural hegemony. No half hearted measures. Take it to ‘em, says I. Let those bastards fight the war on terror. We’ll counter by making them fight a war on pleasure. Any idiot can explode in a public market. Titillation and gluttony are skills.

1. Mike Copeland says:

   January 21, 2010 at 9:09 am

   Quick update: Internet freedom, that is, uncensored internet access for everyone, is now official, front burner, U S foreign policy. The United States State Department has announced in a major, expanded policy statement by Secretary Clinton that free access to all internet content is a basic human right.

   Of course, by “free” the United States, does not mean monetarily free. It means free of censorship once one manages to get on line. Still, this is quite a step. it illustrates that the folk in D. C. have figured out that the internet is a major weapon, effective in the fight against the deadly, lingering pockets of medieval thought.

   About damn time.

   Reply
2. Mike Copeland says:

   January 21, 2010 at 10:21 am

   A quick update from the earlier comment today. A Reuters’ report published in Wired.com claims that Secretary Clinton’s announced address for later today “could be seen as throwing down the gauntlet” to the Chinese.

   While this observation was not attributed to anyone in particular, it is the sort of behind the scenes statement officials, or their subordinates, leak to the press to fortify the weight of their words without being directly offensive to the target. In this case the Chinese.

   There is an awful lot at stake here. Internet based commerce and internet based foreign policy, two spheres, one commercial and the other political, in which the U S believes it has real advantages over the rest of the world, is so important it could be the flash point for larger breakdowns in international commerce. Yet, knowing the potential dangers, Washington doesn’t really have any choice.

   Reply