The Evil of the Internets

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Old, old, ancient topic here. Almost not worth discussing, but here goes.

Some of you might know about the Evony ads. Those are all around the internet these days, including on our very own BoM. You might see it on the bottom of the page if you're not subscribed. Apparently it's some sort of free browser-based MMORPG.

I was at the local library yesterday, revising for uni exams. Around 3pm, a bunch of primary school kids streamed in. I was interested to make a few observations. First, most of them clearly knew how to use a computer. They could log in, go online, and use Google to play flash games. It harkened me back to my childhood, where Google was a novelty. And these kids were 7, 8 or so.

Anyways, one of the younger kids (no more than 5) somehow got the Evony site. And the images there are decidedly boobilicious.

Now it's clear that this young child didn't understand the meaning behind the picture. But it got me thinking. We all know that there's some pretty disturbing stuff on the internet. No, I'm not just talking about porn. Suppose one of those kids stumbled onto 4chan or Goatses (don't google the second one)?

I know I sound hysterical and conservative, but what could be done about this? I don't think banning children from the internet is a reasonable solution, because the internet is basically essential now. It is definitely the parent's responsibility to enforce what their kids are doing, but 1) they may not have the technical knowledge and 2) a resourceful kid could definitely find a way to bypass it and 3) an even more resourceful kid could go to his friend's house and access said contents.

On the other hand, the general computer literacy of my generation means that the parents of the next generation should be more computer-savvy to deal with these problems (although the advent of technology might mean more stuff we can't keep up with, so the point may be moot).

So. Thoughts?

 

Like all other things it is up to the parents and I am also of the opinion that there is no media stimuli which can screw up a child unless it is already screwed up so for me it is no biggy.

 

As library staff, it does make me cringe a little having the knowledge of what the webpages the kids are viewing, since the material is not...well...

I don't think that media stimuli couldn't get a kid really screwed up. Don't overestimate the audiences. The masses, and the individuals which form the majority are foolish. World is littered with people with far less congitive capabilities than what we might enjoy here.

It's not 'just an image'. It's a whole barrage of images and concepts the likes of which has not witnessed in the whole of history of mankind put together. Human brains are very malleable and so is human consciousness. The flood of information and available data is not something everyone can shrug off like it was nothing. Everything we see, changes the way we see the world, bit by bit.

Back to libraries, or limiting information. There's an abundance of books in every library (or should be), that could justifiably deemed to be extremly harmful in the wrong hands. Yet they stay on the shelves to be borrowed. If the circumstances are right, the right book in the wrong hands can partially cause the death of its reader or something of a worse, in larger scale. If the circumstances are right.

Plenty of examples. On the small scale we have The Sorrows Of Young Werther as a prime example. Other very good examples are books about alernative medicine, and about miracle cures for cancer, for instance.

On the large scale we have Mein Kampf, The Bible, The Little Red Book, The Communist Manifesto, etc.

In the wrong hands, in the wrong moment, if the conditions are met...and with 6 billion people the conditions are met often enough.

The net is anarchistic, for now at least. There is no organized regulation of what information is or isn't available, or what information is out-of-date and obsolete. Which is all well and good. No information is completely useless.

I'm not advocating cencorship, far from it, but the brave new world demands a reformation and a readjustment of the education system.

Of course limiting the available information, censorship, and control of subjects is far more financially appealing in short term than making people more educated.

Any totalitarian movement begins with the burning of books. This should not be endorsed.

 

Books require reading. Studies like Mein Kampf, and any of those books you listed, requires understanding of complex materials. Children, who are our subject here, might be influenced in their thought, but I am inclined to think that those are not as potentially scarring as the amount of pictures available on the internet.

Well, they are even more potentially scarring, but images just have an immediate effect.

 

Heh, there's plenty of potential immediate scarring material in any library, but it's the fear of us librarians that keeps the ogling of those books in check, not completely, but far more efficiently than the ogling of webcontent.

Of course, usually hardcore pornography is omitted from the collections. But the netcomputers don't have filters in them in the libraries in my area.

The use of the net requires also understanding of complex materials and systems. Those who currently speak for limiting the net do not seem to have the slightest understanding of what it is. The net is not the children's toy the powers that be in charge seem often
to see it to be...

 

This is one of those very rare circumstances where I agree with Joacqin

Our son's computer is kind of in an open area (which prevents a lot of shenanigans) and now that I think of it the computer lab at the library also is in kind of an open area so I'm not quite sure someone would feel comfortable looking at porn there.

The missus and I discussed this a long time ago, and realized that when he is interested in seeing naked people there really won't be a lot we can do about it. It is our job to reign in the raging mass hormones he will be becoming (which will be sooner then either one of us wants as he is now 13). We are under no illusion that it will be easy.

 

It's not really looking porn I'm concerned with, because let's be frank, there's really not much that can stop a horny teenager. What I'm concerned about is accidentally encountering porn/other such matters, as that kid in my library did.

 

There is no way to control exposure completely. The world is a horrible place. It's best to educate how to deal with it. Children and the human mind in general can survive harsher things.

 

That's the first thing I thought of. We have all sorts of filters on the internet at work - things like gambling sites, gaming sites, and of course porn, are all blocked, and there's no way to bypass the filter without having an administrator's password. My local library has a specific children's area, and the filters for very graphic material (porn and otherwise) could be applied just in those areas. Any library that employs an IT person (and I assume all libraries have at least one such employee these days) could set up such a system.

I agree completely. I don't care if my son sees some scantily clad model on the internet. He can do without some of that other stuff though.

The thing is, I think the generation of today's parents are fairly computer savvy. Sure, the internet wasn't around until I got to college, but we had computers from the time we were very young. I think the difference in computer literacy between myself and my parents is much greater than the difference will be between myself and my child. Add in some web-censoring software on terminals where kids frequently access the internet (which wasn't around in the early days of the net), and I think the potential of limiting exposure to some of the really nasty stuff is easier today than it was 10 or 15 years ago.

 

You wish (and so do I). The funding of libraries doesn't allow hiring that many IT-personnel...

 

How about 1? I believe you, but it's amazing that having one IT knowledgable librarian on the staff is too much to ask for...

 

Honestly, I think we're all a little over sensitive on the blood/gore aspect these days. This is relating specifically to your mention of graphic images of road-side accidents. I mentioned this in a news thread about legislating game violence, but it bears mentioning here, too. When my mother was growing up, one of her jobs on the farm was to watch the headless chickens run around until they died, with blood spurting out of their necks and all, to make sure they didn't run anywhere inaccessible or the like. Apparently it can take a while. That right there trumphs about 95% of video game and online violence out there, and she did this regularly. She turned out well enough. My father made home-brewed explosives and used them to blast stumps out of the fields when he was growing up, to clear the area for farming. Again, on-par or worse-than 95% of explosive worries in gaming today. He turned out well enough.

As for the skin thing, I agree that it is the parents' responsability, and I agree that, ultimately, there's not much they can do in the way of keepign the child from seeing it. The best one can hope for is teaching their child to recognize it for what it is: a cheap (and often dangerously addicting) thrill that ultimately leaves you less satisfied than when you started.

That being said, seeing that this stuff is accessible at the public library does worry me a little. I would ask why we have internet at public libraries, but I do understand that there can be legitimate uses for it. I don't think gaming or goofing off of any kind should be allowed on those computers, though.

 

I think we should shut down the demagog of the internet empire and punish Gore for ever inventing such a evil place.

For the children's sake, stop all this evil madness....

 

I've always been surprised that libraries in North America seem to allow just about any site to be viewed (same problem in Canada). Shopping malls here have free wireless but they have some pretty strict blacklists (I once got the "site banned" message while trying to access a molecular biology electronic journal website!) and if they can afford to blacklist things I don't see why libraries couldn't. They wouldn't even need a full-time IT staff for it, just someone to install the system and set it to update the list in some way, and that's it. Barring that just having a "regular" blacklist, with updates, would still be better than complete open access. I don't even think it would be censorship in this case - it's the library's internet connection, provided for free, you are agreeing to their terms and conditions before accessing and one of these conditions is to not access illegal and "obscene" material. They could easily make the condition more specific (explicity state "no porn or adult material") and that's it. With the blacklist in place I doubt anyone would start going through porn websites one at a time to check which ones are unfileted, and it would mean you can leave your child surfing there without having to worry about what he might stumble on.

 

IMHO, all a parent can do is monitor the child as much as possible in tender formative years and then try to instill in the child a moral code. It boils down to the old question "who watches the watchmen?" and the answer is that in the end they do, so we'd better hope they have a moral and ethical system in place so that they can guard themselves. Otherwise the'll have slash writers at 12, as someone mentioned, and that ain't healthy, I don't care what moral system you subsribe to.

 

Well, same everywhere, with exceptions though. You see, we librarians are

There's an ongoing discussion what material is or isn't "obscene". It varies according to the preferences of the library staff, but the base line is that we're very very lenient towards any material in general.

Once you start selecting too much of what is and what isn't appropriate it'll be a paved way into censorship.

The function of a library is to make information available. The limiting factor is the cost of publications. If every single item was free of charge there'd be splatter films and porn in some libraries selections, since there are customers who might want to borrow these items. The main reason why this type of material isn't on the shelves in magazine and movie format is that usually they get stolen faster than a preacher can say hallelujah. Then we'd have to replace them and that costs money.

The beauty of the net is that it allows access to the sort of material that would usually get stolen, and relative privacy to peruse the items or information. If it doesn't bother other customers it's not a problem.

One of the main reasons of why libraries don't have blacklists of sites is that we usually don't have the right to know what sites a customer visits, and the reason why a library might choose not to use filters is that they don't work too well. If, for instance, a person might want to see genital warts a filter'd be bloody useless and would limit the availability of information way too much.

There you have it:

For a library, this is simply unacceptable, and there simply isn't enough funding, nor there ever will be to go through every possible site and see if access should be allowed or not. Limiting access with the currently available methods is like tying to kill roaches with a nuke. It'll blow away the whole damn neighborhood with the city and you'll still can't get them buggers killed.

 

I think kids should be allowed 100% unfiltered, unsupervised internet access.

They'll adjust. Kids are surprisingly resilient.

As for "12 year old slash writers" - I'm pretty sure I know the person Tal is referring to, and I don't see the slightest problem.

As for the effectiveness of blacklists... you're wonderfully naive. Blacklists* are ineffective - always were and always will be. Almost every piece of blacklist software can be defeated with tricks I could teach most 10 year old kids. And a blacklist in a system the size of the internet is like man holding a sieve trying to stop a flood.

Eventually, if the blacklist even comes close to blocking most objectionable content (that elementary school kids can find) it's going to block a whole lot of content it shouldn't. A blacklist is NEVER going to be manually checked due to the sheer size and mutability of the internet, and you just aren't going to catch everything without a manual blacklist - the only approach that even somewhat works with manual checking is a whitelist, which restricts one to a very small part of the internet.

In addition I've yet to see a blacklist software running under Windows that I wasn't able to bypass one way or another.

* Talking about blacklists, not whitelists or airgaps - whitelists and airgaps both function nearly perfectly but by their nature are extremely restrictive.