children and dangerous neighborhoods

supervision or censorship

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• children and dangerous neighborhoods
  • a neighborhood
  • supervised surfing
  • adults count too
  • the censors
  • another crisis

a neighborhood

There's a really fun and exciting neighborhood a few miles away. It's full of libraries, stories, games, and interesting people. It's a great place to learn and to teach. Visiting this neighborhood is seemingly essential for a child's development into a modern woman.

Government officials, educators, and wise men in our society have praised this wondrous place. They are willing to tax, both Constitutionally and unConstitutionally to help fund transportation to this place. Children and this neighborhood are almost always mentioned in the same breath.

However, there are many dark cul-de-sacs and sex shops. There are sexual perverts that hang out on the corners, all day and all night, waiting to snatch the innocence from our daughters. You would accompany them if you could to this place, but the transportation available only allows for one passenger.

Do you send your daughter there alone?

supervised surfing

Probably not. Then why do we let kids get on the Internet alone? Certainly, if we are not willing to sit with them as they surf, we should have a good understanding of how to protect them when they are online alone. We should also make the effort to educate ourselves about the dangers of a girl surfing the Web alone so that we can talk to our daughters about it.

And, besides, who said the Internet is a place for children?

adults count too

No commentator on the scene is willing to think along that route. There's little libertarian thought in America. Consequently we are left with the model of the Internet as a new babysitter for children, a babysitter that has to be sanitized so that it's appropriate for the youngest amongst us. But let's think about this.

Sure, we want kids to be on the Web. For those children so inclined, it's probably the best source of knowledge for their future pursuits. The Web is full of important scientific information, though it's still best at self-referencing. However, if the Web really does grow into something really important, a thorough grounding in even its postmodern miasma is invaluable.

But the Internet, and the Web (two terms I'm afraid I wrongly use as interchangeable), were invented by adults for adult pursuits. And frankly, adults have a right to expect adult material for their use. I'm not just talking about pornography, but other "objectionable" material, like unpopular speech (which, in case no one has noticed, is banned by just about all ISPs and search engines and directories).

Sure, we want children on the Web, but let's remember that the Web is more than just TV. We pay to get on, and voluntary go where we go. It's like cable TV with millions of channels. Some channels clearly benign, some in obviously bad taste. There has to be some creative freedom associated with a medium that is supposed to reach anyone with the money to buy access. That "anyone" includes adults as well as children.

the censors

The biggest critics of the Web, I suspect, have spent almost no time actually surfing it. President Clinton called for regulation of the Web during both of his terms. A filler piece appearing after his second election eve noted something interesting about the President. We found out that until that election night he had never actually been on a dial up connection. This is reminiscent of his Attorney General's rabid call for TV censorship. Janet Reno divulged during congressional hearings that she actually had never seen a television show.

One usually has to actively surf for pornography (the greatest concern presented to the voting public, though not the greatest concern of the government censors). Searching for ratings on snow tires is unlikely to turn up porno sites. Porno is an industry. You have to pay to get it.

another crisis

Remember the V Chip? Few do, including the masses of mothers who originally screamed that they could not control their children's TV habits. They implored the government to force private industry to do it for them. The V Chip died before the new TVs hit the shelves. We no longer hear about the horrors of sex on TV, though TV has gotten far more explicit than it was when the V Chip fervor set in. Now the White House signs off on scripts to make sure that they carry correct "messages" to children. Sex-loaded TV. Quiet government oversight of scripts. Which is worse? Which is more dangerous?

Now that the manufactured crisis of mothers and TV babysitters is over, we have a new manufactured crisis, the Web. If government has its way, we'll lose the porno sites off the Web. In abstract, maybe a bad idea. In the real world, it's inconsequential. However, what else will we lose? Unpopular opinions? Access to non-mainstream news? The dissenting opinions that keep us from being another authoritarian society? This article?

Let's be realistic. The Web is not a place for a child to roam freely. Like in meatspace, a child in cyberspace must be accompanied by an adult, or have the tools and smarts to safely navigate the waters.