To Orwell Today,

To whom it may concern:

I am writing a story for the Mexican newspaper Excelsior about very young computer users and besides the risks of kids losing their privacy, the risks of encountering pedophiles, and advertisers, I thought about the danger of programming kids to be controlled by a tablet screen well before they go to kindergarden.

So I would appreciate your comments on this matter.

Regards,
Carmen Alvarez

Greetings Carmen,

I agree with you in all the risks you cite regarding very young computer users - up to and including the danger of it programming them to be controlled by a screen - from small ones like cell-phone screens (or even smaller, like on the face of a wrist watch) to massive ones like the TV screens everyone is buying these days.

The latest development - three-dimensional movie and TV screens - makes programming the mind of the viewer even easier, as in the blockbuster green guru movie AVATAR where human beings from Earth, specifically white men from America, are portrayed as evil destroyers of the environment.

Another danger of 3D screens - beyond the mind control - is the physical harm to the brain and the eyes.

Health warning for owners of 3D-TV, iTech/Gadget & Viewing TV Using the 3D Function, Samsung website

In your research (and see examples below) you'll have no problem coming up with facts to support your premise that computer screens put kids at risk - above and beyond the Orwellian surveillance and thought police concepts summarized as BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU through the telescreen.

All the best,
Jackie Jura

Apple patent reveals plans for holographic display, Telegraph, Dec 26, 2010
Television and cinema screens that produce holographic images without the need for special glasses are being developed by computer giant Apple....A recently granted patent reveals that Apple, the company behind the iPod and iPhone, has been working on a new type of display screen that produces three dimensional and even holographic images without the need for glasses. The technology could be used to produce a new generation of televisions, computer monitors and cinema screens that would provide viewers with a more realistic experience. The system relies upon a special screen that is dotted with tiny pixel-sized domes that deflect images taken from slightly different angles into the right and left eye of the viewer. By presenting images taken from slightly different angles to the right and left eye, this creates a stereoscopic image that the brain interprets as three-dimensional....

Why iPhone is the 'Children's Toy of the Year', PCWorld, Mar 11, 2010
Have you ever seen a 4-year-old play with an iPhone? It's actually kind of shocking. Kids take to the iPhone's multitouch user interface like they do trucks or dolls. They instinctively know that the iPhone is a toy, and they nag, cajole and harass their parents into letting them play with it. Every time I spend time with any of my nephews or nieces, they never fail to ask me if they can borrow my iPhone. When I cave and hand it over, they immediately know what to do, and have an encyclopedic knowledge of which iPhone apps they want to play with. YouTube hosts a huge number of videos of very young kids playing with iPhones -- even 1-year-olds.

You don't see anything like this with other phones. The iPhone user interface is so easy, appealing and intuitive that children naturally and immediately "get it." And they don't care about the iPhone's flaws, such as lack of tethering, lack of multitasking or lack of a physical keyboard. Children are hardwired for touch interfaces, and they love iPhones. The role of the iPhone in the lives of children is, in my opinion, an underappreciated cultural phenomenon. While nobody was looking, the iPhone became a universally understood part of children's culture. And hundreds of companies have responded by creating child-specific apps, which makes the device even more compelling to kids. Another trend I've noticed is that when adults upgrade to new phones, they're increasingly handing their old iPhones to their children -- after loading them up with kids apps and canceling their wireless plans. The kids love owning their own iPhone, and the parents love not constantly handing their new phone over to the kids to play with. Everybody wins....

ORWELL TELESCREEN C-U MASCOTS

London unveils creepy Olympic mascots (face is TV-screen with camera-lens eye). YahooNews, May 25, 2010

Health Risks and Dangers of the 3D TV
by Mary Tara Wurmser, Vision Issues
3D movies are all the rage, but as many as 50% of viewers ages 18-40 may have some issues viewing 3D movies including headaches, nausea, dizziness, eyestrain or discomfort. Approximately 5 percent of the population cannot view movies in 3D at all due to a lack of stereoscopic vision most often related to Amblyopia (Lazy eye) and/or Strabismus. But now 3D movie viewing isn't just for the big screen, it has entered the home theatre market with the introduction of 3D home theatres from Samsung, Panasonic, and Sony (slated for summer 2010).

A starter setup for a Samsung 3D television, a 3D blu-ray player, and 3D kit (which includes 2 pair of specialized 3D glasses) is priced around $3000 and upwards (depending on the size of the TV). The glasses are unlike the red/blue glasses of the past and similar to the recyclable glasses used in the movie theatre - but made to work specifically with the 3D Television. Additional 3D polarized glasses are priced around $150 per pair. Viewers (equipped with these pricey battery powered 3D glasses) will be able to watch 2D programming in 3D on the new 3D HDTV but the 'best' 3D effects will result when watching a 3D blu-ray disc through a connected 3D blu-ray player. Not only is the setup costly, it is important to note the possible health dangers. The system carries warnings...

Keep watching 3D TV and you'll go blind
ABC, Feb 11, 2010
...Now that James Cameron's Avatar has become the highest-grossing film in history, 3D is very hot. The hottest new toys unveiled at this year's Consumer Electronics Show were 3D television sets, 3D Blu-Ray players, and comfortable 3D glasses for the lounge room. At least three US-based cable networks have promised 3D broadcasts will begin sometime this year - for the few people who have 3D television sets. Everyone in the consumer electronics industry sees this as the Next Big Thing: now that everyone has purchased big, flat-screen TVs, 3D is the next logical step, the necessary upgrade that keeps us all on the treadmill of progress. The movie studios have also gotten behind 3D in a big way. Just last week Warner Brothers announced that the two final Harry Potter films will be shot in 3D. Is this the decade of 3D? It might look that way, but we'd all better hope it turns out quite differently. You see, 3D is not good for you....

Video games are one of the great distractions of youth. Children can play them for hours every day, and our testers realized that children - with their highly malleable nervous systems - could potentially suffer permanent damage from regular and extensive exposure to a system which created binocular dysphoria in its users. This is the heart of my concern, because 3D television is being pitched as an educational medium - Discovery Channel has announced 3D broadcasts will begin mid-year - and that medium could damage the growing minds it is intended to enlighten. All of this is rolling forward without any thought to the potential health hazards of continuous, long-term exposure to 3D. None of the television manufacturers have done any health & safety testing around this. They must believe that if it's safe enough for the cinema, it's fine for the living room. But that's simply not the case. Getting a few hours every few weeks is nothing like getting a few hours, every single day. One of two things is about to happen: either 3D television will quickly and quietly disappear from the market, from product announcements, and from broadcast plans, or we'll soon see the biggest class-action lawsuit in the planet's history, as millions of children around the world realize that their televisions permanently ruined their depth perception. Let's hope 3D in the home dies a quiet death.

How safe is 3D TV?
Brisbane Times, May 21, 2010
We cannot escape it: consumer 3D is the next big thing, at least in the opinion of the companies trying to sell it to us.... Ever since the emergence of three-dimensional cinema technology in the 1950s, questions have been raised about what it does to our eyes. It was widely known that some viewers of 3D films would get headaches, tired eyes, nausea, dizziness, and some even more worrying symptoms. Here in 2010, excited executives will tell us that that was the old 3D, and the new digital 3D is far better for our eyes. These claims are a little hard to believe when you remember that, essentially, all of these attempts to fool our eyes into seeing 3D are based on the same stereoscopic binocular imagery as they were sixty years ago. The technology may have progressed, but the basic technique is still the same: show each eye an image from a slightly different perspective....

To understand the problem, we need to understand how we perceive 3D in the real world, and how stereoscopic 3D fools our brains. Depth perception, it turns out, is a lot more complicated than just seeing a slightly different image with each of our eyes, technically known as stereopsis. This is certainly an important element of how we perceive depth - anyone who has lost sight in one eye can attest to that - but it is one piece of a very complex system. Several other factors, some physically within our eyes and some extrapolated from what we see, can give our brain extra clues as to how far away an object is. There is one in particular that is baffled by a stereoscopic 3D image: focal depth. In order to focus on objects at different distances from us, the lens in our eye, called the cornea, is flattened or rounded by tiny muscles. As it changes shape, the cornea focuses the light onto our retina to produce an in-focus image. The nerves of the eye can sense how tense these muscles are, and report back to the visual processing centre of the brain, a process known as accommodation.

When we watch a 3D movie or play a game on a 3D television, the depth of focus is fixed, but our eyes will still try to perform the same function they do in the real world. For example, we may have a character in focus in the foreground and try to look into the blurry background. Our eyes will attempt to change focal depth and bring the background into focus, but of course this is impossible; the blur is locked into the image and cannot be changed by our eyes. This conflict - our eyes working hard to focus and being unable to do so - may be a primary cause of the headaches and other problems associated with 3D. University of California, Berkeley, recently published a report on their research into 3D-induced headaches and eye strain, including some good advice on how to minimise these negative effects....

Up until now, public debate about the safety of 3D has centred around the health of our eyes, and for good reason. Pesce, however, is concerned with something even more alarming than sore eyes: damage to the visual processing centres of our brains. "When you watch a 3D film," Pesce says, "your brain is getting some of the real-world cues that it gets when you’re walking around the real world, and it’s not getting some of the others. The brain starts ignoring the cues that it’s not getting, and you’ll leave the movie or turn away from the television, and your brain is still ignoring those cues for some period of time." Exactly how long the brain takes to return to normal depth processing is different for every person; some will return to normal straight away, while other may take minutes or even hours. There are many anecdotal accounts of cinema-goers being involved in minor collisions in the carpark outside after seeing a 3D film because their brains are subtly misinterpreting what they are seeing. There have also been tabloid stories about far more serious accidents.

This is not the main problem, however. Pesce is concerned about the neurological development of children being brought up with 3D televisions in the home. "It's all about the amount of exposure," he says. "I’m not particularly worried about people going to see a 3D movie; they’re going to get two hours of it a month. But two or three hours a night?" The advent of 3D video games is even more problematic, because gamers of all ages will be tempted to sit and play for far longer than the duration of a single film....

The implication of the tests seems to be that, if children's eyes are frequently given only one depth perception cue to work from - stereopsis - and their brains suppress the other cues, then their developing brains can get into the habit of only processing that one cue and always ignoring the others. There may be a danger that their depth perception may be permanently damaged as a result. Pesce admits that, while the data is worrying, it is not yet conclusive. "I cannot prove to you that this is absolutely clearly a problem - hide your children! - but the data that we got fifteen years ago pointed that way, and there just hasn’t been a lot of data since then."

The companies pushing these new products seem to be aware that there are some concerns with the technology. Pesce told me about Samsung's safety manual for their new 3D televisions. "Samsung has five pages of warnings. It’s a document that only a lawyer could love," he jokes. Ironically, the people recommending caution are often fans of 3D. Pesce was at the same Sony event as Jason Hill and he loved the displays. "It was a hell of a good time," he says. "I really want it to be safe... but I don't think it is." Engber also wrote in his Slate piece that "I love 3D, I really do."...

BILL GATES BEHIND TELESCREEN & BILL GATES IS WATCHING YOU

ORWELL DESCRIBED INTERNET & COMPUTERS OUR 1984 TELESCREEN

To Orwell Today,

Thank you for your kind reply.

-Carmen Alvarez

...continued at: 2010 IS 1984 PROPHECY