The New Place Where Kids Will Find Porn

Posted on: 02/12/09 10:16 AM | by Jonathan McKee

Just when you thought there couldn’t be any more porn…

The problem of porn is only growing. Parents already have to put safeguards on their TVs and computers… but that doesn’t cover what could be the largest provider of porn in the next couple of years. Take it from author, speaker, radio show host, Jim Burns:

“By the year 2011… the cell phone will be the greatest provider of internet pornography.” -Jim Burns, HomeWord.com

Those of you who are  EZINE subscribers or on our web site regularly probably already saw our new Four Minutes Video this week. Jim Burns addresses the problem of cellular porn.

(if you receive this blog via email and can’t see the video above, CLICK HERE to see Jim address this issue.)

In addition, CLICK HERE to Download Jim’s FREE Curriculum THE PURITY CODE.

No Wonder Our Kids Listen to It

Posted on: 02/9/09 12:34 PM | by Jonathan McKee

Why are adults surprised that kids listen to raunchy music?

Kids are only following their example.

Last night the Grammys gave us a true glimpse of what adults value in this world. The Grammys has a long history of being THE music awards show. Unlike the Teen Choice Awards, or many of the MTV awards shows, The Grammys are chosen by adults. Then why was Lil Wayne nominated for more than anyone else, 8 Grammys?

Do these adults even know what this guy is singing about? (you can take a little peek at his content in this article) Maybe Lil Wayne should take this opportunity to ask their daughter on a date?

Maybe the same could be said about Kid Rock, Robert Plant and others at the show last night. But I think most adults are probably a little more comfortable with the messages coming from the albums of U2 and Coldplay than the young Mr. Wayne. Or maybe, in today’s world lyrical content just doesn’t matter. Because last night we awarded Wayne with trophies for the explicit album Tha Carter III, and three other songs, including the song Lollipop, an explicit song about oral sex.

“You’re a foul mouthed pervert. Here’s your trophy.”  (pause)  “But kids, you watch your mouths!”

David wrote about the blurring of the line between music for adults and teens last week in our Youth Culture Window article, The 2009 Grammys: Do Adults Like the Same Music as Teens?

Subtle PG-13 Lies

Posted on: 02/7/09 2:21 PM | by Jonathan McKee

It’s always interesting to see what films draw teenagers. A year ago, Juno was the hottest thing. Last fall it was Twilight. So what film has their attention now?

Last Tuesday a film was released that I predict will be one of the next cult classics of this generation. The film is Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist. Like Juno and Twilight, the film has a PG-13 rating. But this is one PG-13 film that has me wondering what the MPAA is smoking.

Let me be clear. I’m not a big fan of the MPAA rating system anyway. I’ve never been one to let a secular rating system tell me which movies are “good” and “bad” for my kids. I’ve seen plenty of R-rated films that I have no problem with (The Passion, Saving Private Ryan, The Last Samurai…). And I’ve seen plenty of PG films that are full of subtle lies. That’s a sore spot for me. I don’t like it when the media lies to us, especially to our kids. It’s completely irresponsible to consistently show actions without consequences. That’s just not the way life works.

Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist is a clever movie with strong characters and creative dialogue… kids are loving it. But not only is it full of graphic sexual talk, hookups and crude humor, it’s also a distortion of reality. There are drastic consequences emotionally and physically to most of the casual behaviors portrayed in Nick & Norah. Are these destructive behaviors true to life? Yes. But they are most often linked to consequences, consequences that the people behind the story of Nick and Norah chose to ignore.

Yes, Cinderella might also be a distortion of reality. Mice and birds don’t make dresses. And maybe there is no Prince Charming for most girls. But I’ve never met a teenage girl who bought into the lie that a mouse named Gus-Gus would be her best friend and a guy on a horse would take her away into the sunset. On the contrary, I’ve worked with plenty of teenager girls that found out the hard way that the casual actions in Nick & Norah have devastating consequences.

Can’t we be real with our kids? Nick & Norah is a nice fairy tale, based on realistic characters and authentic feelings. But we’re fools if we don’t understand how influential this kind of media is on our kids. The imitatable behaviors in this film aren’t just entertainment, they are telling our kids how to live in the real world.

Don’t let your kids construct their ethics from films like this.

This week I devoted our entire Youth Culture Window article to the content behind Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist. In that article I give you a glimpse of what our kids will be seeing in that film. I encourage you to take a peek at the article. Todd also posted a movie review on the film.

Super Bowl Commercials

Posted on: 02/3/09 9:02 AM | by Jonathan McKee

The Super Bowl is the one time a year that I actually watch commercials. When people are paying multi-millions for an ad… they’re usually pretty good.

Well… define good.

This year a few of them definitely drew a laugh from me: the poor executive who suggested that they stop buying Bud Light for their meetings (only to get thrown out of a window), the horse telling the story of his great grandfather first coming to the country (with his good and bad jobs), the Monster.com ad with the moose head on the wall, and yes, I even laughed at the slapstick humor of the Doritos ad with the Crystal ball- an ad that created some of the most Super Bowl commercial buzz (ironically, this ad was the first non-agency spot ever to do this- read more here).

But this year also revealed a trend toward the irresponsible and raunchy. Despites the claim of some that this year was mild and overly conservative, several ads made me look at my wife and say, “Oh no they didn’t!”

One of the most irresponsible ads was also from Doritos, showing a man crunching Doritos, and the crunch gave the man apparent superpowers, like a woman’s clothes being ripped off (revealing her in just lingerie). An ATM starts spitting out 20’s. Then he turns a police officer into a monkey.

It wasn’t the most raunchy ad, but it was definitely the ad that irked me the most. I can’t stand when the media lies to young people. Great message we’re communicating to our kids: sex and money is “where it’s at!” And cops are bad.

Nice.

Even though that particular Doritos “Crunch” ad ranked high, surprisingly, audiences seemed to agree overall that the raunchy ads weren’t the best ones. GoDaddy’s sexually charged ads (or as this article calls it, “breast focused raunchy Super Bowl ads”) received some of the lowest scores from postgame ad polls. USA Today’s Ad-meter (where you can see the top Super Bowl ads ranked and actually view them) ranks these GoDaddy ads way down in 41st and 45th place. But here’s the ironic part. Even though they weren’t rated as “the best” … they were among the most watched. According to this article, even though people didn’t give them high scores in the polls, they liked the ads enought for a second viewing.

Sex sells. It always has.

TV or Internet TV?

Posted on: 01/27/09 9:36 AM | by Jonathan McKee

What is the future of TV entertainment? Traditional TV as it is now, with the help of DVR’s (you know… like TIVO)? Or online TV?

The experts can’t seem to agree on this one.

Here are the facts offered from Solutions Research Group:

  • 50% watch at least some TV online, more than double the figure from two years ago.
  • 70 percent of adults 18-34 have watched TV on the internet as compared to only 36 who said they’ve watched programs recorded on DVRs (that seems low… doesn’t it?)
  • There are 71 million broadband households, but only 28 million DVR households.

Some people look at these facts and obviously conclude that online TV has more potential. But, according to this article, “top media researchers are calling that simply hogwash.”

Bruce Leichtman, president and principal analyst at Leichtman Research Group in Durham, N.H., is one of those who thinks that these conclusions are ridiculous.

Leichtman disputes the data that conclusion was based on. He says his research findings are in line with Nielsen data that the average person spent 142 hours per month watching TV in third-quarter 2008 and that the average person spent six and a half hours watching programs recorded on a DVR, compared to only two and a half hours of TV online.

“And by the way, only a small percentage of online video is television [programming],” says Leichtman. He estimates that nearly half the viewing is of viewer-created videos on sites like YouTube. “You have to put this in perspective.”

Solutions research group still argues that a growing number of people find the internet more entertaining, and even more expect that every TV show will be available online.

So it sounds like TV isn’t dying. People are just trying to figure out where to watch it from.

As for young people? The articles concludes:

“For the younger generation, in particular, we’re finding that the broadband platform is being used more and more as the primary vehicle for television,”

Hmmmmm.

Boosting Self Esteem

Posted on: 01/26/09 2:59 PM | by Jonathan McKee

David’s brand new Youth Culture Window article jabbed me twice this week.

David’s YCW article is always good. But this week’s article about the declining self esteem in young girls had me squirming in my seat twice (for two totally different reasons).

I first questioned the stats about drinking. Do you ever do that? Do you ever read something and think to yourself, “No. That’s gotta be wrong!”

David reports…

More and more teenage girls are trying to drink their self-esteem problems away. We know that roughly 11% of all the alcohol that is drank in America is consumed by a teenager, but recent studies by Columbia University debunk the myth that teenage guys drink more than teenage girls. At the heart of the increase is, you guessed it, low self-esteem. So now it’s the girls who are drinking the guys under the table.

I literally thought, “Yeah, right.” But then I read the report he linked (Don’t you love how we link the studies we quote in the YCW articles?) and looked it up myself. I even jumped back to another Youth Culture Window article he wrote back in October, “The Blame Game on Drinking Games,” an article that I remembered had quoted (and linked) the most recent Center for Disease Control youth risk survey results. Sure enough, more girls were “lifetime alcohol users” than males. Males and females were almost exactly tied for “current alcohol users” (had at least on drink of alcohol on at least 1 day during the 30 days before the survey).

This surprised me. I thought I had remembered guys drinking a lot more. More guys are found to do “episodic heavy drinking” or “buying alcohol.” But girls not only were keeping up in most these drinking stats, they surpassed guys in a few of them. That was surprising to me. And that Columbia University report said that much of this drinking is tied to self esteem issues.

The other part of David’s article that hit me was our response or application. What can we do to battle low self esteem in young girls?

Think about this for a second. How do we build the self esteem of our young girls? Do we just assure them that they are God’s creation? Do we just tell them to simply turn off MTV and stop looking at Vogue? Do we assure them that they’re pretty?

These all sound good in theory… but are young girls actually going to listen to this? Is our voice louder than the media images they are taking in telling them that they just don’t measure up?

That’s where David and I went back and forth a little with the draft of this article. We realized that this issue doesn’t have easy answers. But here’s a little piece of what we finally came up with:

One of the most effective strategies I’ve found to boost self-esteem is providing opportunities to serve. When we put young people in situations where they help others who are worse off than themselves, it is not only a great opportunity to show love and compassion to the needy, it provides these young people with a larger world view than the “plastic” exterior they see in the media and the shallow world around them. When students spend a weekend feeding the homeless or spending time with the elderly in a convalescent home, all of a sudden, their own perceived inadequacies are minimized. This is nothing to do with works. We are saved by grace, through faith. But as God begins to renew our mind and change us, we no longer looks to temporary fulfillment from this world (including looks, status, stuff) … instead we look to God for fulfillment

Seize opportunities to help kids be used by God..

Create these opportunities.

Whadaya think?

Hottest Virtual Hangout Growing Even Bigger

Posted on: 01/23/09 12:14 PM | by Jonathan McKee

IMVU.com is back in the news again, with $10 million of financing from Best Buy’s corporate venture-capital group. IMVU is the 3D virtual community (picture a virtual pickup bar, but filled with teenagers and adults all anonymously guised as perfect looking people) that has grown to more than 30 million users. It’s literally one of the largest of its kind.

Many of you remember an article that David and I wrote last June after diving into this virtual world and experiencing it firsthand. After two hours of navigating our newly created avatar through this world of cybersmut… we had seen enough. The site is nothing more than a virtual pick up place. Nobody is who they say they are, and morals are nowhere to be found. That’s probably why we titled our article:

The Hottest Virtual Teenage Hangout… A Little Too “Hot”
A Virtual Pick Up Joint Where Authenticity is Scarce

Check out that article, not only to see our research about the site, but for a detailed description of what we encountered personally.

Here it is six months later and the site has grown by another 10 million users and with 10 million more dollars to spend on development. I shudder at the possibilities.

Sigh.

(ht to Anastasia at YPulse for the new article)

Greg Stier on Embracing Real Conversations

Posted on: 01/21/09 10:20 AM | by Jonathan McKee

If you haven’t been following the new FOUR MINUTE videos that we’ve been putting up on our front page, we’ve been featuring a new one every three weeks or so.

I love the one we just put up there. Dare to Share’s Greg Stier talks about the need for youth workers to embrace real conversations about theology that matters. In this quick little video, he challenges us to be ready for questions that might even be uncomfortable. He also talks about a tool that will help us initiate these conversations, a brand new reality TV DVD series they offer called The Gospel Journey Maui. We have an exclusive free download of one of the episodes of this cool little show for you on their web site here.

Here’s the FOUR MINUTE video. 

(Click here to see the video if you receive this blog as a feed or email.)

Good stuff!

Lyrics “Under the Radar” of Parents

Posted on: 01/20/09 9:47 AM | by Jonathan McKee

I’m so used to today’s music being blatantly raunchy and sexual, I’m almost surprised when musicians use sneaky tactics to slip messages under the radar of parents. But that’s exactly what Britney has done with this new song on her popular new album Circus… she’s dropping the “F bomb” without actually saying it.

The song is If You Seek Amy. It looks innocent enough when you read it… but go ahead and say it like she does in the album. Read this outloud: “But all of the boys and all of the girls are begging to if you seek amy.”

Whoops!

David does an incredible job unveiling this in this week’s Youth Culture Window article.

Update: According to this Aussie newspaper, Britney might be changing the name of the song for some radioplay.

Textoholic

Posted on: 01/15/09 10:49 AM | by Jonathan McKee

We all know that kids love texting, with repercussions good and bad. And many of us have heard stories of kids who text literally thousands of text messages per month. After all, the average number of monthly texts for a 13- to 17-year-old teen is 1,742, according to a recent Nielsen study.

But 14,528 text messages in one month?

California dad Greg Hardesty almost fell out of his chair when he discovered his AT&T statement was 440 pages long (thank goodness it was an online statement). His daughter Reina had texted 14,528 text messages that month.

Grab your calculator….

    -That’s 484 texts a day.

    -That’s 34 texts every waking hour.

    -That’s more than one text message every two minutes that Reina is awake!

This girl’s cereal definitely gets soggy every morning.

Can  you say, “out of control?”

Click here for the entire article.

(ht to Youth Culture Window guru David)