This article is more a question than a hypothesis.
I recently attended in interesting talk about privacy, and one of the panelists worked for one of those massively multi-player computer game companies. He said something that sounded interesting at the time: Some of the most popular games on the internet, even free facebook games have mission-command-style data centers where people monitor users in real time and attempt to make the game a more interesting experience.
At first, I thought this was a fun idea, but then I got to thinking about the long term implications. Basically, they are using Skinner-esqe psychology to affect the way game players brains are wired.
There are families where two parents work 50+ hours a week, and now we have these super-conditioning computer games available with 24/7 instant gratification feedback. Thus it could be said those children are getting 24/7 supervision not from their parents, but from a for-profit corporation.
So just to speculate, is our culture headed for a perfect storm of child development disaster? Are we producing instant-gratification sociopaths?
