We're All Doomed!: Video Games and Porn

For my Humanities class assignment We’re All Doomed! I watched the TED Talks video Philip Zimbardo: The Demise of Guys? at http://www.ted.com/talks/zimchallenge.html. Zimbardo’s thesis is that guys are failing academically and in forming relationships with women and video games and porn are almost certainly the cause. Zimbardo offers a wealth of supporting evidence, as follows. 1) Boys are 30% more likely to drop out of school. 2) Girls are now outperforming boys at all levels from elementary school to graduate school. 3) Boys are less likely to get BA’s (44% vs. 56%) and graduate degrees (45% vs. 55%. 4) Boys make up 2/3 of special ed. students. 5) Boys are 5 times more likely to be diagnosed ADHD. 6) Jane McGonigal: by the age of 21, boys spend 10,000 hours gaming, 2/3 of that in isolation. 7) Cindy Gallop: guys don’t know the difference between making love and doing porn. 8) Average boy watches 50 porn clips a week. 9) Porn industry is the fastest growing industry in America. 10) For every 400 Hollywood movies made, 11,000 porn movies are made. While researching the supporting evidence, I got lucky. I found the website, http://www.demiseofguys.com/resources/, which lists all the resources Zimbardo used to come up with the above evidence. If a specific web site wasn’t listed, I simply used google.com to search the keywords. The statistics on education (#1 – 5) come from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). Zimbardo actually cited this web site, http://www.pbs.org/parents/raisingboys/school.html, but THEY got their info from the NCES. Jane McGonigal’s data (#6) came from her web site janemcgonigal.com. She has a research page at http://janemcgonigal.com/learn-me/. Cindy Gallop (#7) presented a talk at a 2009 TED conference. View the video here: http://blog.ted.com/2009/12/02/cindy_gallop_ma/. For more, visit her web site, makelovenotporn.com. The porn statistics (#8 – 10) are from http://internet-filter-review.toptenreviews.com/internet-pornography-statistics.html. I appreciated that not only did Zimbardo do his research, but he made it easy for others to find the same information. There were many other web sites and papers cited, all that provided some evidence that Zimbardo’s concerns are valid. The sources of most of the statistics were reputable organizations, like the National Center for Education Statistics, or experts within their fields, like Jane McGonigal. What I found most interesting about this exercise was that Zimbardo used some resources and/or experts who didn’t agree with his thesis but that still provided data that he was able to use to support his belief. For example, Jane McGonigal is a game developer who believes that video games can and are changing the world… for the better. But Zimbardo found that her information on boys playing video games in isolation fed into his thesis. His use of the research this way was fascinating and helped me look at how I do research in a different light.