11121003 Hugh Hewitt: Hour 3 – Hugh spends the hour talking politics with NRCC chairman Pete Sessions, with Washington Post The Fix blogger Chris Cillizza, with former Michigan GOP chair Saul Anuzis, and with Townhall.com political editor Guy Benson. Later in the hour, Hugh concludes the week in verse with an ode by Tarzana Joe.
11121002 Hugh Hewitt: Hour 2 – Hugh talks politics with Washington Post syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer, economic news of the week with Brian Wesbury, then back to key committee chair races in the GOP with California Congressman Ed Royce.
11121001 Hugh Hewitt: Hour 1 – Hugh talks about global warming hysteria with Cool It – The Movie star and producer, Bjorn Lomborg and Terry Botwick.
A story on Slate on a study – the most exciting words in the world, perhaps? Here’s the latest:
Sex, drugs, and text-messaging? A new study suggests that “hyper-texters”—teens who send more than 120 text messages a day—are more likely to binge drink, get in fights, or take drugs, and are three and a half times more likely to have sex than their textless peers. Researchers looked at more than 4,200 students at 20 Cleveland high schools, categorizing kids as hyper-texters or hyper-networkers—people who spend at least three hours a day on social networking sites. While hyper-texters are more sexually active, hyper-networkers are more prone to drinking and fighting.
Most people would look at this survey, and say: hmmm. Interesting. Can we draw any conclusions? Perhaps not; correlation is not causation. Or the other way around. Something like that. Anyway, it’s part of a larger problem that has little to do with technology, and a lot to do with parenting. When it comes to gadgets, most kids are light-years ahead of their parents. Put in nerd-Trek terms, the kids are in the Delta Quadrant, and Mom and Dad haven’t yet left Earth’s gravity well, which means they can’t engage warp drive; if you use the interdimensional resonance of a dilithium-crystal powered engine to establish a subspace field while you’re in a gravity well, it’s BLACK HOLE CITY, PEOPLE –
Sorry. Got off topic. You get the idea. You may also suspect I am up on tech, since people who are versed in fictional tech usually eat up the real thing with rapacity. My daughter is cursed with a father who knows just enough to know what he needs to know, and how to defeat any future end-runs around my mad skillz. But I don’t think that day will come, he said, speaking like someone who’s never raised a teenager, because we have laid the groundwork: trust, communication, verification, consequences. Daddy got root.
If you’re not up on these things, it can be baffling and annoying; it can seem so irrelevant to your own life, your own modes of communication, and you decouple from the world of texts and IMs and DMs, contenting yourself with a hazy gauzy assumption that your kid is a good kid, and wouldn’t do anything wrong. You may be right. The survey seems somewhat ill-conceived anyway – it’s not the texting that makes kids promiscuous or more inclined to introduce chemical enhancements, it’s the culture in which they marinate that has few peer-established roadblocks. It’s not that kids necessarily want to do the bad things, but their culture is incapable of saying they shouldn’t. That would be uncool, judgmental, wack, uptight, L-7, Herbert. Hence the confusion and miseries of adolescence. Nothing new there.
What’s amusing, in a sad, sad way, is watching putative adults grapple with the story while trying hard not to be Dad. Engadget had the stupidest piece EVAR, as they’d say. Headline:
Study finds that text message-addicted teens more likely to have a life
According to a recent study lead by Dr. Scott Frank, an associate professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine, kids in Cleveland who text over 120 times a day are more likely than to have had sex or to have used drugs or alcohol than kids who don’t send as many messages. We’re guessing it’s because it takes in excess of 120 text messages for kids to line up their drugs, alcohol, or sex partners.
Uh huh. Sex, drugs, alcohol = a life. A more perfect distillation of the snarky, hip internet attitude you won’t find. My stance is more important than where I’m actually standing. It’s like watching someone attempt to confront a moral issue while quaking in terror of people in the comments who might accuse him of being unrealistic or a prude or thinking everyone doesn’t do it cuz evry1 doez LOL. Perhaps a fellow might expect to be called into the office to explain why he said texting teens were more likely to engage in immoral activity – we don’t do Bible stuff here, ‘kay? Saying that sex & drugs = “having a life”? Not unless anyone complained.
One can only say: dude, wait until you have kids of your own. I know, I know, it’s all relative, every generation says the same thing about the previous, and so on. Why, people protested Elvis’ hips! But I guarantee you Elvis was sitting in a stupor in Graceland one night, tuning through the TVs, and came across something he found a bit risque. “That’s allright,” he probably thought. “But they ain’t’n’t ought to put it on the TV.”