Posts Tagged ‘technology’
Canadian Study Calls for Greater Responsibility in Use
By Father John Flynn, LC
ROME, OCT. 21, 2007 (Zenit.org).- An explosion in media technology means both parents and society need to be more alert to the dangers children face. This was the warning contained in the Oct. 15 report entitled “Good Servant, Bad Master: Electronic Media and the Family,” published by the Ottawa-based Vanier Institute of the Family.
Author Arlene Moscovitch reviewed Canadian and international research on the media, and in her report she acknowledged the positive side of the media, which is a useful source of education and entertainment. As well, new technologies also help families stay in contact with greater ease.
At the same time the report warned of some more negative consequences.
— Heavy users of electronic media in all age groups spend less time interacting with partners, children and friends.
— Researchers fear that excessive exposure to media among very young children may lead to problems of attention control, aggressive behavior and poor cognitive development.
— With growing problems of obesity and diabetes among children, it is a concern that the vast majority of food advertisements during children’s programs are for foods high in sugar, salt and fat.
— Many parents worry about children being online for long periods and the kinds of things to which they are exposed.
Technology overflow
Moscovitch noted that according to the Consumers Electronics Association of America, the average U.S. home now boasts 26 different electronic devices for communication and media. In Canada only 1% of the population owned a DVD player in 1998, now they are present in 80% of households.
Also in Canada, 94% of young people have Internet access at home. Half of grade 11 students, and surprisingly even 20% of those in Grade 4, have their own Internet-connected computer, separate and apart from the family.
Mobile phones are used by 44% of young Canadians to surf the Internet, and 22% have webcams.
Citing data from a time use survey carried out in 1995 by the government body Statistics Canada, the report noted that Canadians aged 15 and over spent just over 2 hours each day watching television, compared to more than 3 hours in 1998.
Radio use remained relatively stable between 1998 and 2003, at about 3 hours a day, but 30-45 more minutes a day is going to telephone usage, and time spent on the Internet has risen.
A study of 5,000 youth carried out in 2005 by the Media Awareness Network found that on an average weekday, Canadian students spend — sometimes simultaneously — 54 minutes instant messaging; 50 minutes downloading and listening to music; 44 minutes playing online games; and only 30 minutes doing school work.
Overall, in Canada and the United States many young people are spending less time with print and television media, and more time plugged into interactive media like mobile phones, video games and Internet-connected computers. Moreover, this media activity is increasingly done in their own bedrooms, rather than in communal family spaces.
Infants at risk
One of the main forebodings in the Vanier Institute’s report is how very young children are exposed to the media. Moscovitch cited a recent study that showed 50% of U.S. infants and preschoolers live in homes with three or more TVs, 97% have clothes or toys based on media characters and three-quarters share their living space with a computer.
The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends no screen time at all for children under the age of two years, yet a 2003 study of the media habits of U.S. children from birth to six years of age found that almost 70% of children under two years spend on average two hours every day watching either television shows or videos. In fact, 26% of toddlers under the age of two had a TV set in their bedroom.
Other recent reports confirm the deleterious effect of television for the very young. On May 27, the Boston Globe reported that a study by pediatric researchers found that about 40% of 3-month-olds watch television or videos for an average of 45 minutes a day, or more than five hours a week.
The study was based on 1,009 random telephone interviews with families in Minnesota and Washington, and published in the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine journal.
This early exposure can have a negative impact on an infant’s developing brain and put children at a higher risk for attention problems and diminished reading comprehension, according to the researchers.
Social sites
Turning to older ages, the Vanier Institute reported that media usage evolves to become more active and socially oriented. A 2005 study of young Canadians carried out by the Media Awareness Network found that among young people, 28% have their own Web site, 15% have online diaries and blogs, and that by grade nine, 80% of all teens are listening to music online and instant messaging daily.
By late 2006, 55% of all U.S. online teens were using social networks such as MySpace and Facebook, and 55% had created online profiles.
The dangers of social networking sites was confirmed by a report dated Oct. 14, published by the Pew Internet and American Life Project.
The study entitled “Teens and Online Stranger Contact” reported that 32% of online teens had been contacted by someone with no connection to them or any of their friends, and 7% of online teens say they have felt scared or uncomfortable as a result of contact by an online stranger.
Those who have posted photos of themselves and created profiles on social networking sites are more likely to have been contacted online by people they do not know, according to the study.
Among teens who have been contacted by someone they do not know, girls are significantly more likely to report feeling scared or uncomfortable as a result of the contact compared with boys.
Parental concerns
Many parents, the Vanier Institute report observed, are uneasy about the media’s impact on their children. Apprehensions include not knowing who their children are in contact with, what sort of songs they listen to, and if they are falling prey to temptations such as online gambling and pornography. Moreover, many parents are unskilled in the technologies being employed by their children.
Parents can, however, influence their children’s media habits. The report recommends a number of steps.
— Limit the number of individually owned devices and move them out of bedrooms and into public spaces.
— Limit the times at which they can be used. For example, don’t have the television on all the time, particularly during meals.
— Limit also the total amount of time kids spend with their devices on a daily basis.
— Make rules about giving out personal information or visiting certain sites on the Internet.
— Help children, particularly those who are younger, to distinguish between fantasy and reality by talking with them about the content they encounter in the media.
— Discuss with children their experiences on the Internet and ask them about the games they play, the sites they create and the way they interact socially.
Forming consciences
The report also recommended that parents help instruct their children in the values they need, and not just leave it to chance through the values that the media communicates. By doing this young people will be more prepared to critically judge the information and goals coming from the media.
“Users should practice moderation and discipline in their approach to the mass media,” recommends No. 2496 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church. “They will want to form enlightened and correct consciences the more easily to resist unwholesome influences.”
A responsibility that becomes more indispensable than ever in this age of rapidly developing media technologies.
WASHINGTON, D.C., OCT. 11, 2007 (Zenit.org).- Benedict XVI’s Regensburg lecture not only pinpoints the heart of the current international situation, but also reality itself, says Father James Schall.
In the third and final part of this interview with ZENIT, Father Schall, a professor of political philosophy at Georgetown University, comments on what he says is one of the most important discourses of modern times.
He is the author of “The Regensburg Lecture,” published by St. Augustine’s Press. Part 1 , Part 2 .
Q: How do you see the Regensburg lecture in relation to John Paul II’s encyclical “Fides et Ratio”?
Father Schall: What Benedict XVI sees is the fundamental importance of “Fides et Ratio” on a world scale, not just with Islam, which was something new in John Paul II’s time.
John Paul II was rightly taken up with fascism, Marxism and the moral status of the West. John Paul did collaborate with Muslims in several U.N. conferences — Cairo, Beijing — especially about the family, in spite of the differences between Muslim and Christian views on what the family is.
“Fides et Ratio” is the consequence, as it were, of the other two stages of de-Hellenization in Western thought. The second step was with von Harnack who took the consequences of denying that Jesus was divine. He was just human, a nice man. He was a leader or prophet or voice, but he was not the God-man, not the incarnate “Logos.” Thus we did not need theology to understand him; rather, we need the social and historical sciences.
Benedict XVI, as he indicates in his book “Jesus of Nazareth,” is often concerned with the claim of scholarship to unearth the fundamentals of faith by science’s own methods alone. All it can unearth is what is known by the methods, so more and more fundamental things are left out as such scholarship claims priority.
“Fides et Ratio” is a long, incisive analysis of modern philosophy alongside of the question of what kind of philosophy will enable us to understand what is really revealed.
The very notion of a “Christian philosophy” arises from the need to understand in terms of reason just what was said in revelation. The use of a Greek word, not a scriptural word, at the Council of Nicaea, as the Pope said, indicated that under the pressure of understanding revelation, the philosophical experience could be fundamental.
Faith and philosophy are not in contradiction, but are related to grasp the whole of reality. Both are necessary. This is why pure Scripture is not enough even to understand Scripture’s own positions. As Chesterton remarked at the end of “Heretics,” it would be revelation, not reason, which, in the end, said that the grass is green, that reason in faith alone would affirm the ordinary things of reality that the modern philosophers could no longer comprehend.
Q: In your book, and in the Holy Father’s lecture, there is no effort to “turn back the clock” and deny the achievements of modernism. In what ways do you see an integration of the old and the new?
Father Schall: First of all the term “modernism” is generally meant to be a declaration of independence of modern thought from what is past, Greek or scholastic. However, thought in modernity more and more loses its moorings in an ordered reality.
As the Pope points out, the third de-Hellenization is what we call “multiculturalism,” a belief that there is no real truth in any culture so that there are no fundamental issues between civilizations or religions, only a kind of tolerance about truth’s impossibility.
Despite the claim that multicultural tolerance does not involve violence, its very system contains within itself a tradition within history that does claim that violence is in fact justified by voluntarist premises. In other words, on a purely multicultural theory, there is no reason why voluntarism is not a legitimate position as there is really nothing to oppose it except power.
The Pope repeats several times that he does not want to “go back,” but he does wish to distinguish what is good and what is not in modern thought and culture.
Rommen said that the natural law is perennial, that is, it keeps coming back when we reach positions within a culture that normal men of common sense can see clearly wrong. The objective standard keeps calling disorder and injustice to our attention. The Regensburg lecture is an intellectual challenge. This is why it is precisely an academic lecture and not an encyclical; it insists we face the truth and falsity in any culture on the basis of “logos,” of reason.
You will notice that the Pope brings in the notion of the fascination with mathematics that we found in Plato. He addresses the scientific mind directly and tells it that its discoveries are based on the fact that mathematics and its many sophistications work in reality. There must be a correspondence between principles of reality and principles of mathematics.
Why is there this correspondence if there is not a realistic philosophy to explain why? And if there is this correspondence, why is there not an ultimate mind that orders all things found with mathematics as well as with its own systems? Much current literature is based on the claims of a new kind of atheism, one that often lacks the intellectual rigor of more classic forms. The confidence of modern atheism does not face the strange correspondences between mind and reality that even science cannot avoid.
The problem with science is not only what it is, but what are we going to do with it? The classic Greeks were said to have known all sorts of inventions but chose not to pursue them because they understood the dangers they might entail for human living itself.
The Regensburg lecture gives science and technology their due by pointing out that they are not everything, but what they do is valid for a certain aspect of things. They can only explain what falls to their competence.
Philosophy, ethics, theology and poetry all reach to realities that are not direct objects of science, to things that are essentially spiritual and nonmaterial. The human intellect transcends its own being to be concerned with all that is.
We are bewildered if we think that science can explain everything, but this does not mean that what it cannot explain is therefore not explicable. It rather means that other insights and ways of knowing have their own validity.
The word of the Pope to science is not “don’t be scientific” in the proper sense. It is rather to stop limiting itself to only one concept of reason, a very narrow concept. This concept is good as far as it goes. But it is one that excludes by definition most of the important things men are concerned with.
The Regensburg lecture takes us to the heart not only of current events, but also to the heart of reality itself. Philosophy and revelation are not enemies of each other, but are directed at one another. The exaltation of man by revelation does not imply that he is not what he is created to be, a rational animal, one who does all he does by “logos,” by reason.
Man is the glory of God in the sense that God can address his word to him and he can know and comprehend because he is created with the power to know the truth of things. The moral and political life of man is designed to enable us to know what is addressed to us from reason and even, if it happens, from revelation.
What seems clear about the Regensburg lecture is that the best place to understand our times is in the heart of Rome itself. Here, in the native tongues of recent Popes, in Polish, or German, and, yes, Latin, they speak to us of what it means to be human, to be beings addressed by God in both reason and revelation.
Babies Eliminated as New Eugenics Gains Force
By Father John Flynn, L.C.
ROME, JUNE 25, 2007 (Zenit.org).- The desire for perfect babies combined with the possibilities of biotechnology is taking an ever-higher toll. Preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD), and other forms of screening enable the detection of genetic defects, leading either to embryos being eliminated before implantation when combined with in vitro fecundation, or to abortion in the case of pregnancies already in progress.
Philosopher Michael J. Sandel considered some of the ethical questions involved in this practice in the book “The Case Against Perfection,” published in May by Belknap Press. A professor of government at Harvard University, Sandel starts his brief book by asking if, even when no harm is involved, there is something troubling about parents “ordering up a child” with certain genetic traits.
Sandel’s approach is nonreligious and does not fully embrace the position of the Church. For example, he defends embryonic stem cell research. Nevertheless, the book provides a useful series of reflections which invite the reader to consider the implications of both eliminating individuals with genetic defects and also efforts to “improve” physical or mental capabilities.
This “drive to mastery,” as Sandel terms it, runs the risk of destroying our appreciation of the gifted character of human powers and achievements. In other words, “that not everything in the world is open to any use we may desire or devise.”
When it comes to parenthood, Sandel comments that unlike our friends, we do not choose our children. “To appreciate children as gifts is to accept them as they come, not as objects of our design, or products of our will, or instruments of our ambition.”
Thus, he continues, the problem with wanting to choose children with or without certain genetic characteristics is in the hubris of the parents. Such a parental disposition, he adverts, “disfigures the relation between parent and child.” As a result the unconditional love that a parent should have toward a child is placed at risk.
Sandel also warns that if we erode the sense of the gifted character of human powers and achievements we will damage three important elements in society: humility, responsibility and solidarity.
A school for humility
Parenthood is a school for humility, according to Sandel, in which we care deeply about our children, and also live with the unexpected. When it comes to responsibility, the more we become involved in determining our genetic qualities, the greater the burden we will bear for the talents we have and how we perform.
For example, once giving birth to a child with Down syndrome was considered a matter of chance. Today parents who of children with Down syndrome or other disabilities feel blamed for not having eliminated the child before birth.
In turn, this growth in responsibility could well damage solidarity, Sandel continues, because there is a very real risk that those who are less fortunate will come to be seen not as disadvantaged, but as simply unfit.
Sandel is not the only one to be worried over what happens to those who are less fortunate in the genetic stakes. A number of press articles over the last few months have taken up the matter of the elimination of embryos detected with Down syndrome.
On May 9 the New York Times published an article reporting that, following a new recommendation by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, doctors have begun to offer a screening procedure to all pregnant women, regardless of age, for Down syndrome. About 90% of pregnant women who are given a Down syndrome diagnosis normally choose to have an abortion, the article reported.
The article then went on to describe the efforts by some parents to educate the medical profession about the fulfilling lives that children suffering from disabilities can lead. Advances in medical treatment and appropriate attention means that, despite not inconsiderable difficulties, Down syndrome children can achieve much in their lives.
Morally wrong
The New York Times returned to the argument on May 13 with another article. Among other testimonies was that of Sarah Lynn Lester, a supporter of abortion rights, who nevertheless continued her pregnancy after learning her child had Down syndrome. “I thought it would be morally wrong to have an abortion for a child that had a genetic disability,” she told the newspaper.
Earlier this year the Canadian Down Syndrome Society launched a public awareness campaign to counter the trend toward genetic testing, reported the National Post newspaper Jan. 10.
The campaign came just as the Society of Obstetricians and Gynecologists of Canada released a recommendation that all expectant mothers undergo screening for Down syndrome.
The article also quoted Dr. Will Johnston, president of the Vancouver-based organization Physicians for Life, who said his members find the move toward more fetal screening to be troubling.
“I think it shows our inability as a culture to be as inclusive and accepting of diversity as we would like to think we are,” he said.
Italy is another country where genetic screening is increasing. According to a March 11 report in the national daily newspaper La Repubblica, by 2005 no less than 79% of Italian women were having three or more ultrasound examinations during pregnancy.
The tests, however, can sometimes have a tragic outcome. On March 7 the Italian news agency ANSA reported on the case of a 22 week-old fetus aborted because of a mistaken diagnosis of a defective esophagus.
After the ultrasound examination, which erroneously seemed to reveal a problem, the mother decided to abort. The baby survived the abortion, but the following day ANSA reported that it had died.
Cosmetic screening
As biotechnology develops, genetic screening seems destined to expand even further, with ominous consequences for babies. On May 6 the London-based Sunday Times reported that the Bridge Center Fertility clinic had received the go ahead from the Human Fertilization and Embryology Authority to screen a couple’s embryos in order to create a baby without eyes affected with cross-eye, also known as a squint.
The article also noted that screening has now started for some forms of cancer and early-onset Alzheimer’s.
“We will increasingly see the use of embryo screening for severe cosmetic conditions,” Gedis Grudzinskas, medical director of the clinic, told the Sunday Times.
David King, director of Human Genetics Alert, was critical of the decision to allow such screening. “We moved from preventing children who will die young to those who might become ill in middle age,” he noted. “Now we discard those who will live as long as the rest of us but are cosmetically imperfect.”
Concern over such trends was also expressed by Benedict XVI in an address given Feb. 24 to members of the Pontifical Academy for Life. “A new wave of discriminatory eugenics finds consensus in the name of the presumed well-being of the individual, and laws are promoted especially in the economically progressive world for the legalization of euthanasia,” the Pontiff warned.
In today’s increasingly secularized world our consciences face increasing obstacles in distinguishing the correct path to take on these and other issues, the Pope added. This is due both to a growing rejection of the Christian tradition and also to a distrust of the capacity of our reason to perceive the truth, he explained.
“Life is the first good received from God and is fundamental to all others; to guarantee the right to life for all and in an equal manner for all is the duty upon which the future of humanity depends,” the Holy Father concluded. A duty made increasingly urgent in the face of increased pressures to manipulate life.