paradox city

A photo I took while driving through a familiar part of North Antrim this morning. I was trying to use up the remainder of a film I had used as part of an assignment for the local PWA. I love driving through the Antrim Hills - you see so many beautiful (and varied) sights. I long to leave this country often - but I never want to leave North Antrim.

games affect concentration and... where was I again?

Where was I? Oh yeah; I’ve been thinking a lot about attention span recently. I’m convinced that kids today have a shorter attention span than we did when we were at school. I put it down to TV and Video games but that’s only because I tend to state the obvious (sometimes twice)

A couple of weeks ago the Simon Mayo radio show was brought from some big computer game expo thing. I didn’t catch all of it as I was supposed to be doing work or something. I do, however, remember listening to various people discussing the relative merits or otherwise of modern computer games. They looked at educational value, hand eye coordination – they even made some comment about how they were preparing young people for what was becoming an increasingly fast paced world.

I’ve played the Max Payne and Grand Theft Auto series, I’ve enjoyed them, great for letting off steam – however I really don’t want to be in the kind of world they’re preparing me for.

Another piece of recently published research linked computer games and TV to childhood obesity. They weren’t stating the obvious ‘if kids stopped starring at a screen long enough for them to get off their fat butts and go for a walk they might not be so fat.’ No they were making things just a little more confusing. They suggest that watching TV and playing games before going to bed affects sleep patterns which consequently affects eating patterns which consequently makes kids fat.

Personally I would add to that hypothesis slightly. I believe that watching TV and playing games before going to bed affects sleep patterns which consequently affects eating patterns which consequently affects concentration levels which consequently draws kids to the no-concentration-required world of TV and games which consequently affects sleep patterns… I, of course, have a solution – the Jamie Oliver computer game. No, don’t thank me now, I do it for the good of the kids.

One thing I didn’t pick up on during what little of the radio show I heard was the old nugget about how computer games can affect our behaviour. How some child plays Grand Theft Auto and then has an unquenchable thirst for violence – an urge to go out into the street and beat up a prostitute. Sometimes I think that the media over-hype this kind of story. I really do believe that behaviour can be affected by the games kids play – but when serial killings and group beatings are blamed on some gameboy title it all becomes a little ridiculous. I’ve seen kids in the playground practising some move they saw on playstation the night before. Luckily it was from Pro Evolution Soccer, not Manhunt. And at the end of the day that’s how it will happen – kids behaviour will only be affected by games in the same way it will be affected by TV, movies and even books. I’m a little worried about how all those Harry Potter fans will turn out.

I leave you with some words of wisdom passed on to me by a wonderful Canadian/Swiss/Croatian artist. “They say children are affected by the games they play – if that was true those of us who grew up in the eighties would all be moving manically round, listening to electronic music and swallowing pills … ... oh”

usually I disagree just for the sake of disagreeing but...

Have you ever had one of those "you know what, he may just be right" moments?

education to come?

A quick quote from a novel I read recently. Hayley McDonald’s, school kid in the future, has just finished performing a presentation on why she loves America. This is in a time when corporations have become so powerful that they are more important than government, so important that our surname depends not on our family, but on who we work for:

The teacher jotted something in his folder. McDonald’s-sponsored schools were cheap like that: at Pepsi school everybody had notebook computers. Also their uniforms were much better. It was hard to be cool with the Golden Arches on your back.
-Jennifer Government - Max Barry

The novel is a very enjoyable read. I also found parts of it (such as the exert above) more than a little disturbing. Disturbing in that I can see them happening. There is a huge disclaimer that the start of the book attempting, I assume, to ward off law suites from Mattel, McDonalds, Pepsi, the NRA and especially Nike. It points out that the novel is a work of complete fiction – that none of the events would ever happen.

The thing is I can see some of it happening. The big corporations already influence government – is it such a wild jump to imagine them usurping it? The sponsored schools thing – well that scares me stiff. So you can imagine my horror when I picked up a copy of this year’s school magazine and looked at the back. There, in bright writing, is a list of companies who have ‘helped out’ the school in the past year. It was a long list. A similar list has been put on the brand new minibus that those companies ‘helped’ us buy.

I’m inclined to give the benefit of the doubt and consider such help community involvement rather than out and out sponsorship but how long will it be before we cross the line that we’ve been kicking recently? How long before I’m teaching maths using Tesco price lists?

forgive me

Apologies to both of my readers for the unscheduled break in transmission. This was caused by necessary maintenance to an unexpected fault on the line. Oh, and I had a wee touch of the flu.

Nothing serious – I was still going to work, passing on my germs to countless kids in the hope that an 87% pupil absence rate forces the school to add a couple of extra days to the half term break.

Having said that, the thought of turning on a computer and looking at that flickering screen for all but the most life/career threatening purposes made my stomach heave in a most unsettling manner.

So you’ll excuse me – I know you will – I know that you are the kind of discerning reader who would rather wait a few days than have to scrape vomit off your screen before reading. And for that I thank you.

driving and talking

I was out for a drive today and saw a hitchhiker outside the Causeway Hospital in Coleraine. She was headed for Belfast but I wasn’t planning on going any further than Ballymoney – Still she reckoned every little helps and got in.

Almost immediately we began one of the best conversations I’ve had in months. It just seemed to move seamlessly from topic to topic with hardly a break for her to take a bite of her sandwich or for me to check my dangerously low diesel level.

It turns out she’s from the Yukon, had been wondering what to do, decided to hitchhike her way round Ireland – like you do if you’ve got a spare moment in the Yukon. We discussed people, differences in people, similarities in people, relationships between people, people and their food, people and their jobs, people looking out for other people and people and religion.

It turns out she’s an evangelical Christian. Despite being here for months she claims she only met her first evangelical Christian in that past few days. I found that really hard to believe but was more than happy to take her word for it.

It turns out she finds all the different versions of Presbyterianism confusing – this gave me the opportunity to try out my short explanation of the various Ps. Now anyone who has listened to my explanation of the various Ps will know that the 7 miles between Coleraine and Ballymoney isn’t going to cover it – not by a long shot. And by the time I’d finished and she’d returned the favour by explaining the various Canadian denominations we were well on our way to Antrim.

I can honestly say I had an absolute ball and Elizabeth, despite the fact that I ran out of diesel on the ride home, I look forward to talking to you again sometime… highly unlikely but I look forward to it anyway.

what was I talking about again?

I’ve been thinking a lot about attention span recently. I’m convinced that kids today have a shorter attention span than we did when we were at school. I put it down to TV and Video games but that’s only because I tend to state the obvious… Sorry, lost my train of thought – I’ll come back to this some other time.