Thailand has banned Grand Theft Auto IV because they reckon it causes people to hijack taxis. Online media rail against the heavy-handedness and denounce the Thai authorities as ignorant reactionaries.

And yet we blame right-wing TV and talk radio for causing people to support criminal regimes and abortion-clinic bombings. We say “of course Bush won the last election when he had Fox sluicing out propaganda and lies all day“.

Clearly the media we consume tangibly alters our behaviour.

Trouble is, it’s not strictly an adult-child divide between who is susceptible to media suggestion and who isn’t. It’s a smart-dumb gradient. Dumb people will vote for who they’re told to vote for, mimic any asinine behaviour they see, and generally fail to distinguish between fantasy and reality. Yep, this describes children pretty well, but there are also plenty of adults who would benefit from being denied access to violent/suggestive/manipulative media.

Being smart is all about taking your inputs and doing some processing on them before connecting them to your outputs. Going directly from advert-in to wallet-out is a lack of processing and a complete bypass of thought, consideration, analysis, wisdom… in other words, a lack of intelligence.

But dumb people are always going to do dumb things, so banning video games and talk radio isn’t going to help them. It may help the rest of society ignore the problem for longer and feel better about our failure to educate the imbeciles though.