CHILD'S PLAY

By CALVIN TRILLIN

Here is what nobody has bothered to mention in all the talk about how V chips are going to protect our kids from the smut and violence on television: in most American households, the only people who understand how to program modern electronic devices are the children. So the V chip will presumably have to be managed by the very people it is meant to control.

You're thinking that it won't work that way. From what you've read, you understand the V chip to be so simple to use that a grownup can do it. That's what was said about VCRs. Yet we all know people like Bennett and Linda Weber, whose travails I reported on a year or two ago. The Webers thought they were pleased that their 26-year-old son Jeffrey had finally moved out of the house, and then they realized they had lost the ability to tape.

Someday, of course, people of Jeffrey's generation will be the parents in control, and they will be casually hooking up V chips to CD-ROMs and the Internet so that their children can play nonviolent, smut-free, four-dimensional Parcheesi with friends in Bangalore while listening to symphonic background music. Until then, though, any attempt at a techno-fix like the V chip will put the inmates in charge of the asylum.

This hadn't occurred to me until last week, when I was talking to a television reporter about the controversy over the rating system that will be used to offer parents guidance about which programs they may want to block. The television industry, which is in the enviable position of writing its own warning label, has resisted the content-based system favored by virtually everybody else, presumably on the theory that warnings of violent or suggestive content could scare off viewers and advertisers.

Having decided on a fuzzy, age-based rating system similar to the one used by movies, the networks are having their flacks write op-ed pieces that extol the Aristotelian virtues of vagueness. In a similar position, the tobacco industry would favor a cigarette-pack warning label that says, "Some people sort of think that cigarette smoking may not be the absolutely best thing you can do for your health, although some others may disagree."

Networks may also dread a content-based rating system because of the potential embarrassment of seeing most of their programs listed in the paper with an accompanying V for Violence or L for Language or S for Sex. Think about what could happen if the industry ever lost control of the ratings, and someone like the editor in charge of the television listings decided to offer absolutely honest appraisals. The daytime talk shows would be rated PE for Pathetic Exploitation; the shopping channel would carry a UA for Untrammeled Acquisitiveness; and most sitcoms would be rated MT for Mindless Trash.

Even without those improvements, I told the reporter, I thought content-based ratings might be specific enough to serve some purpose. Liberals could block violence, and conservatives could block sex; and in a desperate attempt to see plenty of both, their children might visit each other's homes often enough to make a start on getting along with each other when they grow up.

But then, I could envision a younger version of Bennett Weber trying to block, say, programs that contained strong language and instead doing something that caused the set to transmit nothing but cooking shows. "Do something!" he says, turning to the child he's trying to protect. That child is Jeffrey at 14, who says, with a sly grin, "Don't worry, Pop. I'll take care of it."