Re: Psychiatric industry now trying to classify video game playing as a "mental disorder" requiring treatment

Talk about a mixed messages from the mainstream. Here is a trend recently observed.

It was Sunday about 3 weeks ago that I visited with family. A sad comment in this is that these visits have slowly become less frequent, this mainly out of a desire to increasingly avoid the effects & influences of TV. There is only one way to avoid the direct effects. However, one thing learned the past 2-plus years of being unplugged is that the indirect channels are more prevalent than I had planned for prior to that day 2-plus years ago. When they occur, my visit with family sort of goes like this. Walk into visit house to visit mother & father, pretty much any day of the week, and mother will be found in the living room in front of a turned-on tv, while father is found similarly in his bedroom infront of his turned-on tv. Walk up stairs to visit with elder sister and .... flip a coin, she might be found infront of a turned-on tv OR she migh have the tv off and biding her time dealing instead with true reality.....elder sister is one of the few reclamation-projects that even comes close to success in my endeavors to educate family members on the hazards of tv :) This was a September Sunday, in central Pennsylvania, so on this day even though the TV upstairs was not on the moment I walked in, after the Sunday meal, this quickly changed come 1PM EST. It was at that point that I took up a chair in the far back of the room a good 30 feet away from the tube where it was a lot easier to not get sucked in. Many recent studies have shown that the current suck-in factor that TV has evolved to is approximately 45 seconds for adults, but closer to 20-25 seconds for children, especially young children/infants.

Since unplugging February 05, I've since discovered that when visiting with people still plugged in, since I cannot avoid this particular exposure short of just getting up and leaving, it is a lot easier to try and make this a productive, educational experience by watching/listening/sensing along with them, at least in snippets, so as to study the phenom. Along the way I've noticed that I can now quickly pick up on what (to me) are overt programming vibes that seem to generally go unnoticed, or at least uncommented on, by the faithful still plugged in, and this applies whether the content is literal advertisign "commercials" or subtle advertizing by way of the content of the main program - be it news, sitcom, talk show, sports, etc. For instance, I quickly noticed what is the current state-of-the-art routine for advertizing commercials (the industry collectively responsible for enabling the payout of the astronomical salaries to those employed in the NFL). At least in the first half, the pattern is: cut to commercial break on each change of possession that does not involve a score. If there is a score, cut to commercial immediately after the kick (extra point or field goal), then return to game action long enough for the following kickoff that itself is immediately followed by another commerical break after which the recieving team then puts it's offense ont eh field; repeat as necessary. Doing some informal time-measurements with a wrist watched, the first pattern revealed during the first several minutes of the first quarter of the game in question (itself made up of several consecutive 3-and-out series) - there was slightly more commercial play-time during this particular period than there was on-the-field football play time.

Another trend noticed: commercial-advertising promoting video games that themselves are sponsoring gung-ho, macho-joe (and if I recall correctly, a modern, occasional token butch-joan commando) all in a neat, tidy war "battle combat" video-game motiff. Anyone suspect the social engineers have pegged this one particualr demographic?...... football fanatics, who love beign plied with commercial advertizing that covertly is selling them real war by way of the latest, greatest video fake version of same, interspersed with other commercials that tend to play to a lowest-common-denominator mentality by way of beer commercials, fast-food restaurants, cheesecake and auto-sales that tend to favor the macho, cam-headed big, gas-guzzling pick-up trucks (typically Dodge)... and every now and then, a few series of actual football playing out on the field. To test this theory, it would be interesting to see how a legitmate vote count would tally as polled among NFL fantics only, polled with the question - do you support continued war in Iraq?

If there is any validity to what the industry shrinks have concluded in this article, one must also conclude by implication that the mental disorder observed in video-gamers is itself in large part an outgrowth that extends from related deranged behavior of the hordes of people who, in most cases, grew into their present video-gaming habits by first having come from a lifetime background in requisite training; tv viewing.....which is to say, video-games much older big brother, pun intended..... and this of course, contradicts the agenda long promoted by the tv industry "consumption of tv content (traditionally referred to as 'viewing' but more precisely involves absorbing by way of sensory input whatever content the frequencies are carrying - audio/video/subliminal/etc) does not influence viewers behavior"......nod nod, wink wink....why else does the industry fork out a few billion $$ in advertizing expenses per year?.... SURVEY SAYS, just so people can not be influence by all the work those broadcast dollars were put to. Funny, that notion of "no influence" generally comes wrapped around the raking in of many more billions to trillions on behalf of the tv/broadcast/advertiser syndicate due to the spending habbits of the duly advertized....the advertised?....anyone remember the advertized?....those otherwise are known as audience?....those people busy not having their behavior influenced as a result of hours upon hours spent absorbing TV broadcast frequencies?.....anyone?....;)

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