GeekLimit

Please Government, protect me from MySpace!

Posted by The Technocrat | Filed under Geeky

Security risks, threats from viruses, privacy invasion, lack of consumer protection laws and the many problems associated with may be far less real than many Internet users believe. That isn’t the point. It’s what they believe that matters.

That quote is from eight years ago. You’d think we’d learned our lesson…

The recent flap over MySpace is nothing new. We see it every time a new technology comes out, and the source is always the same: parents, special interest groups, and news outlets.

Parents

These fall into two categories:

those that have been convinced that there is a major problem when there really isn’t.

This is the group I hope most parents are in. The news outlets are to blame for the most part. After all, loving parents are an easy target for a sensationalist headline. What better way to sell newspapers and advertising than to make it seem like there is an extreme danger threatening their kids? This, of course is evil. But there’s money to be had, so they do it anyway. Special interest groups aren’t far behind.

then there are those parents who want someone else to do their job for them

These are the parents I hope you’re not. Unfortunately, there are parents out there who really don’t care enough about their kids to be troubled in learning about online safety. Since they don’t have the time to teach their kids morals or responsibility, they’d rather just try to make the threat go away.

In a twist of irony, their unwillingness to be responsible for the education of their kids results in the kids never having the chance to develop their own sense of responsibility or morals. Unfortunately, these kids are programmed to go astray; after all, ‘if they shouldn’t be doing something, surely someone would have kept them from it…’ Hopefully these parents will realize that it’s easier to teach their kids to drive the road of life, than to try to pave a road in front of the car…

Special interest groups

These mostly appear to be:

terrified parents with some money or political clout who forgot to do their homework
polititians who want to look like they’re doing something so terrified parents will vote for them

one is trigger happy, the other manipulative. ‘nough said.

News Outlets

Some of these guys aren’t as bad as you would believe:

If you look at stories about online danger in the last 10 years, some of them have been trying to steer parents into education. What’s interesting is that they usually have stories every 8 months or so advocating the co-education of parents and students, often suggesting they go online together and talk about safety. Kudos to CNN and a few others.

Then there’s the rags and soundbyte hunters. Again, loving parents are an easy target for a sensationalist headline. The good news is that people are learning that they can get their news elsewhere, besides the few companies that control nearly all news outlets. Kudos to all of you who refuse to be spoon-fed what your opinions should be.

Further Investigation

Finally, if you’re one of these people who still is gung-ho about going after MySpace, like you were about video games two years ago, like you were about chat rooms four years ago, like you were about the internet six years ago, and like you were about the internet eight years ago, please do everyone a favor:

Back up eight years and start educating yourself on the proper way to use technology with your kids. (article is from 1998, but it’s good to go back to when the paranoia started)

Anyone ready to place bets on how long it will be until people start asking for the Gov. to get rid of the Child-Food-Processor ™ that is MySpace?

Comments (0) | February 28th, 2006