I read “Mind Games” [The Last Word, November/December 1999] with great interest. David Grossman and I have discussed the issues surrounding media violence and its impact on children at length, and I’d like to offer the observations I’ve gathered from 15 years of law enforcement.

Anyone who thinks that media don’t affect the behavior of children has not witnessed a child mutilate himself by carving the name of his favorite band into his own flesh with a razor blade. He has not talked to a child who can answer questions only by quoting song lyrics written by Marilyn Manson. He has never tried to talk a child out of suicide after the child has been convinced by Nine Inch Nails that there is no hope.

When I was a child, Rob and Laura slept in separate beds on the Dick Van Dyke Show. Today, 12-year-old girls are mothers. Gangster rap teaches our children a predatory approach to life where women are exploitable and people are expendable. If anyone doubts that, talk to a 12-year-old drug-runner who flashes gang signs and carries a gun. Violence glorified is violence repeated.

This is simple cause-and-effect programming. The continued denial by so-called professionals in this field is a tragedy. We are, quite simply, byproducts of learned behavior. Which explains why a 15-year-old boy would attempt to stab a police officer in the middle of a grocery store. It may further explain the answer I once received from an 18-year-old murderer: “I just wanted to see someone die.”

Until we as a society are willing to be accountable and forgo some of our precious “freedoms,” we will continue to reap what we sow.

—Cpl. Franklin D. McBee
Palm Bay Police Department
Palm Bay, Florida

As a media-literacy consultant to corporations, schools, and parent groups, and as a parent of two sons, I sat back in wry amusement as I read the exchange between Henry Jenkins and David Grossman.

For the past 15 years, I have worked with thousands of parents and teachers each year. I am “in the streets,” so to speak, and debates that continue to perpetuate theoretical ideologies just make me shake my head. Through day-to-day experience, I’ve learned important practical lessons about how children can be protected from the negative effects of media violence. I’d like to share a few of them:

Talk with youngsters about the latest horror they have seen. If we don’t put what they see in context for them, the media will.

Be on the alert for a child’s obsession with violent entertainment or the escalation of its use. Are violent images the main or only source of a child’s pleasure and satisfaction? Does your child need increasingly graphic displays of brutality for fun?

Look at the pace of the programs children are watching. The faster the image changes on a TV show, video, film, computer, or video game, the more likely the content will be violent. Just by choosing slower content, we make sure kids are doing more thinking and less reacting.

The next time you watch TV, observe the commercials. Is there violence there? Any blood-splattering, limb-crunching, heads-flying-off action? No. Americans would be outraged to see such commercials. If gratuitous violence is not acceptable for selling products, why do we tolerate it as the mainstay of our children’s amusement?

In thinking about violence in media and violence in life, we have to distinguish between correspondence and causality. Both types of violence are symptoms of a deeper problem. As David Grossman says, “This is about greed.” He was referring to the greed of video-game companies. In truth, America is suffering from a plague of selfishness and greed, which extends from the corporate exploitation of human weakness to the decline of funding for public education.

In terms of the effect that these ungenerous times have on our children, violence may be the least of our worries. Their role models consist of actors, models, athletes, and accidental billionaires. They feel that money is the most important thing in life. They are lured away from higher education by the mantra of easy money. They are deeply suspicious of politicians and unengaged by democracy. We are not transmitting the values that will give our children the resilience and resourcefulness that the 21st century is going to require of them.

Censorship is no use. In fact, it is a really bad idea, for more than the constitutional reasons. Ugly media are to the culture what pain is to the individual. They are a warning signal that something is wrong and needs attention. Your hand is on the stove, your body has been invaded by microbes, your kid is experiencing profound cynicism and powerlessness. If we eliminate pain—or ugly media—we lose a vital source of information about ourselves. Stopping the pain isn’t the answer; we have to heal the problem.

Passing a censorship law is trivial. Passing a gun-control law is trivial. Making healthy lives for our children is not trivial. It requires thought, time, energy, investment, and long-term commitment. There are no shortcuts. All of us—media-makers, parents, citizens, and government—need to step up to the challenge of making positive and productive change.

—Brenda Laurel, Ph.D.
Design Research Consultant

Thank you for the excellent discussion of video violence and personal rights expressed in the recent article, “Mind Games.” While I take Henry Jenkins’s view that video violence is not the problem we think it is, I enjoyed the breadth and depth provided by David Grossman’s opposing viewpoint. I find articles of this type far more useful and effective in helping form reasonable opinions than the banal regurgitation of facts and authoritative sound bites so common in other magazines.

—Christopher Ireland
Chief Executive Officer
Cheskin Research

THE LITMUS TEST

Editors’ Note: Context’s executive publisher, Mel Bergstein, writes a monthly e-mail newsletter called Digital Strategies. In it, he addresses questions that other senior executives face in the digital marketplace. His latest issue touched on the perils of confusing optimization—faster, better, cheaper—with true innovation, or killer apps. Bergstein received a number of insightful comments from readers, which influenced the CEO User’s Guide column he wrote on the same subject for this issue of Context. We’ve included some of those comments below.

If you are interested in subscribing to the Digital Strategies newsletter, send an e-mail to: subscribe-digital-strategies-replies@community.diamtech.com.

This is the first time I’ve felt compelled to comment back to any e-mail newsletter or article I’ve ever received. I do so because of the high value of your content. You’ve got interesting thoughts regarding the ways that “killer apps” can provide a unique experience or service to users while “faster, better, cheaper” initiatives cannot.

This is the core concept of the book, Futurize Your Enterprise, by David Siegel. The premise is that businesses in the future will be providing community experiences and services for customers that actually provide value in the form of new, unique, and highly valuable (to the customer and the business) relationships.

One of the book’s examples is a firm that currently markets software to manipulate consumer photos, but that “futurizes” by becoming a Web service community where families share photos, experiences, and information related to their holiday or other travel. The “futurized” firm offers scanning, the ability to send multiple gifts like pictures on mugs, vacation albums, digital multimedia vacation files, etc., to its customers’ friends and families, who are all part of an ever-growing community of life-experience-sharers. The potential for viral marketing is clear.

I completely agree with you that creating a new killer app requires bringing in outsiders who are unhindered by current business models and legacy restraints. It seems to me that a firm must hire a team of outsider rebels, whose job is to destroy the current business model with a new way of interacting and bonding with customers. It’s up to the management to then begin the process of building new businesses around the new philosophy, or miss the opportunity and slowly sink into e-business oblivion.

—W. Craig Tomlin
Manager, New Media
WellPoint Health Networks Inc.

At Black & Veatch, we have purposely tried to avoid paying any attention to the killer-app rhetoric. We always stand back far enough to look at the places in a business process that others are missing. We drove data-centric thinking into engineering at a time when it wasn’t fashionable and rose from 13th to 1st in power-plant engineering. That was a killer perspective, not a killer app. Now, we’re preparing for the next revolution in the engineering/construction business and expect it to bring about quantum changes for us, the business, and the value we bring to our clients.

I have seen very few “revolutions” come from the realm of “faster, better, cheaper.” For example, we found that for a $400 million power project, if we reduced our costs by 50%, it would only yield a 3% reduction in the total installed cost. Yet, if we cut a 30-month design and construction schedule by six months, the change could increase revenue by many times that amount. And the money would go directly into the client’s pocket by way of reduced interest costs and the ability to jumpstart a plant that produces $60,000 an hour in profit. The only thing different between us and our competitors was that we stood back far enough and looked beyond what they saw.

—John G. Voeller
Senior Partner
Black & Veatch

There are some interesting thoughts here. I recently read a study about the number of innovations that are developed and then, when they’re tried, are overtaken because there is a second firm waiting in the wings to see where the problems are. The fast followers capitalize on the originator’s ideas by implementing the improvements while the originator struggles with the inherent imperfections.

Speed and fluidity are critically important today. I would be interested in a checklist of organizational strategies that companies are employing with their innovations to avoid the prospect of being the first to market with an idea and then not being able to capitalize on it long-term. I continue to enjoy Context. Thanks.

SERIOUS PLAY

While I enjoyed much of Eric Nee’s (reasonably) fair-minded review of my book Serious Play [Book Reviews, November/ December 1999], he makes one argument that demands refutation. Nee’s criticism betrays a common—and dangerous—misunderstanding of what innovation is really about.

Nee complains: “Serious Play’s argument about the importance of modeling and prototyping in innovation goes too far. He treats a culture of innovation as more important than anything else....Schrage quotes approvingly from the French sociologist Frederick LePlay, who said, ‘The most important product of the mines is the miner.’ ...Intel helped create Silicon Valley’s entrepreneurial spirit, but was the company’s cultural contribution more important than its invention of the microprocessor? No.”

Actually, the answer is an unqualifed, Yes. If all Intel had done was invent the 4004 microprocessor and then fail to introduce the next-generation chip, it would be yet another failed Silicon Valley company whose bleached corporate bones litter the Highway 101 landscape. Instead, Intel’s culture of rapid prototyping, relentless simulation, constant innovation—and ruthless marketing to match—made it into a global powerhouse. It wasn’t enough to just invent the microprocessor; you had to reinvent it every 18 months or die.

To successfully innovate, tomorrow’s companies are going to have to do a better job of understanding that, in the real world, the most important product of the innovation process is, indeed, the innovator. That’s what the future will be all about.

—Michael Schrage
Author, Serious Play