It’s been brought up so many times that I cringe whenever I see the words MySpace or online predators come up in the headlines, and although my position certainly hasn’t changed, it seems only fitting – especially this week after the last saw legislators once again introducing a bill to require “age verification checks” on popular social-networking websites in a feeble attempt to protect the children – to revisit the topic one more time in hopes of shedding a ray of light on a concept supported by anyone who values the Information Superhighway as the limitless, incredible resource that it truly is.
We need to stop trying to regulate each other, and even the Internet itself, and start to focus on ourselves.
Whether it’s the threat of dirty pictures, inappropriate chat sessions, or worse when those chat sessions result in someone being hurt or taken advantage of, many are very quick to point their fingers back at the medium itself as being to blame for the mishap at hand, and albeit there’s a very distinct difference in the seriousness between little Johnny finding his first bit of porn online and his sister being raped by someone she was chatting with whom she thought as in the seventh grade just like her, I think the end result of parents and legislators being up in arms about the Internet being the way it is is simply a waste of time that could far better be spent preventing such situations in a method that makes sense to not only those who are concerned, but also the rest of us who actually understand how technology and social networking has not only come to be, but will continue to evolve over time…
I think it goes without saying that age checks are inherently a stupid idea – they’ve only been partially effective at keeping underage kids out of bars over the last couple of decades, and at least there you’ve got the face-to-face interaction going for you to help bring up the numbers. On the Internet there’s no bouncer or bartender to look you in the eye just to be sure, and we all know … or all should know … that there’s really nothing stopping you from putting whatever birth date you please into that age verification box when it pops up on Insert Adult-Oriented Website Here. Hell, most of the time I just put in fake information and I’m of age! And before we give in, let’s not forget that some don’t even expect us to enter our real age – only to click a button stating that we’re of the legal age to do whatever we’re about to do.
Yeah, because although your kids will be kids and likely broke that antique vase in the living room when they told you that the dog actually did it, they’d never click a link on a website if they weren’t supposed to!
So yes, that just cut out the simplest of options – proof of age before granting service – but it doesn’t really deal with our issue of children being safe online and unless Mom or Dad is willing to call MySpace to verify each and every character that wants to be added to their daughter’s friends list before she’ll be allowed to converse with them, clearly the responsibility is just going to have to fall back on the other side of the fence. That’s right, parents – I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, “You’re going to have to supervise your kids while they’re using the Internet!!!”
“But we’re too busy!” or “We can’t watch them all the time!” or “We don’t understand the Internet ourselves!” – whatever your excuse is, it’s never going to be good enough for me because your first and foremost priority should be raising whatever kids you happened to bring into this would and frankly, that means keeping them safe while you teach them the ways of the world because there will eventually be a time when they’ll have to fend for themselves and will need to understand how things work on their own. And please note that keeping them safe doesn’t mean expecting somebody else to do it for you.
Seriously, would you let your children watch HBO or Cinemax at night when it gets good and raunchy? How about play around in your gun cabinet on a rainy afternoon? Maybe even have some fun with all of those smelly chemicals underneath the bathroom sink that you can’t even use without opening every window in the house? Of course you wouldn’t, because that would be insane! And in the same respect, you’d be just as crazy to let your children do whatever they want on the Internet, at least before they’re old enough to know the difference between right and wrong, and what kinds of things they should stay away from. But just as you might choose to have those premium channels on your cable bill that are geared more towards adults or a healthy array of nauseous cleaning supplies on-hand so as to avoid the stenches that you and your buddies just sort of learned to live with back in college, you simply have to take certain precautions if you’re going to have those kinds of things in your household along with folks that aren’t quite ready for them just yet.
The problem is, nobody ever wants to take the time to actually share these kinds of things with their kids and yet they have no qualms whatsoever about throwing a stinking fit whenever they find out that their teenage son has been looking at pornography online or that the daughter is chatting more with college guys and worse than she is with her own classmates. At the end of the day, the Internet is merely another communications tool designed to make our lives easier – you’d ground the kid for a month if it turned out that she was calling complete strangers in Tokyo just to chat about “stuff.” Now I know that the Internet is a whole lot tougher to regulate than the telephone ever was, but for anyone who really wants to learn, the tools are out there and between filtering software and plenty of parent-child communication about what’s ok to do online and what’s not, a fairly safe environment can be created.
No, you’ll never get an online community that’s 100% fail-safe, but then again, there’s no guarantee that you won’t get in a car accident while you’re driving them to school, either. I know it sounds harsh, but seriously, what’s it going to take for people to start taking a level-headed approach on this and work towards a solution themselves without expecting everyone else to change because little Johnny is getting curious?!
At the end of the day, the Internet is just a tool for us to use as we see fit and like any other potentially-dangerous entity, we either have to do every reasonable thing that we can do within our control to help educate ourselves about its dangers or we just have to stay away from it altogether. And honestly I would really hate for it to come to that for any family because there are so many great things that Internet access can offer a home, from the ability to learn more about virtually any topic with only a few keystrokes to keeping in touch with distant friends and family, and even making new friends that we’d otherwise probably never meet due to geographic or other social boundaries. The pros by far outweigh the cons in being connected in this day and age, and all it’s going to take is people truly harnessing that information and really making use of it as an educational, character-building tool in their home to help raise their children instead of merely the new babysitter handed off from the television in the ‘90s, and I think that most of these problems that we’ve seen stemming from the online community will simply take care of themselves.
A child who has an honest relationship with his parents and knows why he’s only allowed to talk to kids that he knows from school online is already safer than one who just surfs in the evenings at home because she’s bored without any involvement from her parents about what she’s actually doing locked away in her room. Sure, it’s not going to be easy and often times you’d like to think that it’d be simpler to just have some other company or the government tell everyone to leave your kid alone instead, but even if they’ll consider it in an effort to keep you happy (and get your votes), it’s just not going to happen given the nature of the online community as a whole. There’s always going to be exceptions to the rules or grey areas or ones that slip through the cracks, so either unplug yourselves now and forever limit your family to the wealth of knowledge that the world has to offer or finally understand that the only regulation of the Internet that will ever work is that which begins right there in your own home…
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