Among the joys I derive from being a Monitor of Everything from my humble downtown San Francisco desktop, is catching the patterns, the odd convergences, the coinciding of events that together suggest the actions of a Great Organizing Force. The GOF in the Machine, if you will. Such mysteries, in their more harmless forms, leave us scratching our heads, and thinking "I'll be damned." Occasionally, when coincidence is liberally spiked with irony, the Universe can feel downright cruel.
This week, you decide which applies -- if either.
Harris Interactive has just released the results of a poll conducted in September of 2004 (! -- I must raise a cry to practical statisticians everywhere: "Why in God's name should it take a year to compile ONLINE poll results?") of about 2,500 Americans. The gist: "What should Government do about porn?"
To believe Harris' parse of the results:
More from the Harris Poll:
What Government Should Do?
When it comes to the role of government, the most widely endorsed position is that the government should "regulate Internet pornography specifically so that children cannot access X-rated material online" (42%). Whether this would be possible is debatable, but it is the preferred policy of 53 percent of women and 30 percent of men.
The remainder are divided between the following:
* Twenty-three percent believe "whether one likes it or not people should have full access to pornography under the Constitution’s First Amendment."
* Thirteen percent believe "the government should regulate pornography in a similar way to how cigarettes are regulated – with warning labels and restrictions so that harm is minimized."
* Ten percent think "the government has no role with regard to pornography."
* Only one percent says their preferred policy would be for "government to fully legalize all forms of pornography."
Hmmm. Not exactly revelatory -- or of much use at all. I think we probably could have guessed that most people would want to keep porn out of the hands of children. No? Am I crazy here? What's happened here, and is a tad frightening, is the answers given by poll takers to a question which has proven difficult to answer PRECISELY because it does not resolve to a simple yes or no, HAVE BEEN POLARIZED, to FORCE a binary result. Look how cleverly this was done. If you're like me, for example, who favors the rational imposition of some strictures (partly technological, partly in the form of guidelines for parents and for pornographers), and I were given to choose between "Control Porn" and "PORN is FREE!", I would have to choose the former -- it's the closest match -- but, BUT, it's NOT the answer I would give if asked. I know better than that. The issue demands better than that. What you wind up with is a meaningless commixture of what are in actuality disparate opinions, which were (there is no other word) MANIPULATED to create an apparent result. In this case, and too bad for Harris', who I'm sure does as well with definitive (if misleading) headlines as anyone else in the media does, the numbers proved hard to lump together. But God knows they tried.
And, right on cue, as if to allay the worrisome lack of Concensus in the land, the FCC:
Cool, huh?
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