Category: Media and Communication

In the United States and many other countries, media such as movies and television are assigned intensity ratings that are meant to give audiences expectations around potentially objectionable content. Today, these ratings are age-based; for example, for movies, we have the ratings G, PG, PG-13, and R (for movies that are traditionally allowed to be exhibited in theaters), and each of these ratings corresponds to an age that someone should be in order to watch content with that rating. However, I argue that this rating system based on age is actually not effective, and I argue instead that an alternative approach based on just content descriptors (like TV ratings in the US but without the age identifier) is better.

It was only recently that I started posting a lot more of my content on this website. Some of it represents new ideas that I started thinking about in the past few months, while other posts reflect writings that have been sitting on my laptop for months or years, where I then reconsider the ideas with my modern knowledge and frame of mind. This has felt liberating for a number of reasons, one of which is something I have been recently thinking about: the power of records.