Don’t censor my internet!

I’ve been writing a paper about literacy online, and I keep getting really really cross at attempts to censor the internet.  There’s all this talk about ‘protecting the children’ and blocking unsavory images, or anything that offends someone’s sensibilities. But I really don’t think that censoring these things will do anything to protect children.  I mean, yeah, there’s this sexualised image of a child and it’s offensive.  But it’s not offensive because it exists.  It’s offensive because some complete and utter pratt has abused that child.

And what do parents do when they find these things?  They panic, and try to protect their child from that image.  But it’s not the image they need to protect their child from.  It’s the photographer and their gaze.  It’s the gaze of the sexual adult.  I’m no expert in this, but I sense that we get uncomfortable precisely because children shouldn’t be sexualised. Our initial reaction is to hide the image, pretend it does not exist.  And yet, it does.  And so does the child in the image.  The child who could be our own.

I’ve been reading up on road safety because I think the analogy between road safety and internet safety is a powerful one.  Most of us (my generation, the parents) grew up with cars and trucks and motorcycles.  We learnt the ebb and flow of them.  We learnt physics[1] from them.  But most of us don’t really understand the internet.  We don’t know how to protect our children from the ‘information superhighway’.  But superhighway is not really a good analogy because we don’t let our children on highways, but we do allow them on the backroads.  We feel safer when we know that there are controls on traffic.  But, again, we don’t let them out without clear instructions on what’s safe and what’s not.  That’s our job as parents.

Why then do we allow them unsupervised on the so-called information highway.  Our highways are not going anywhere.  Well, they go somewhere, but they also stays where they’re put.  We know where that highway is, and we train our children with how to deal with that:

• Stay away from moving cars
• Look both ways
• Cross at the crossing
• Walk, don’t run

All these simple rules begin a process which prepares our children for navigating the roads of our neighbourhood.  But we don’t ever ask the Gubmit to ban cars from the roads.  We don’t demand that other people give up things to protect our children[2].  We accept our role in educating our own.  I know I did this.  I’m not giving up my car so your child won’t be hit by it[3].

So, tell me why I need to give up access to information to protect YOUR children?

1. or at least, momentum, movement, speed [↩]
2. except perhaps speed where speed is unnecesssary, and stupidity, yeah please give that up on the roads [↩]
3. I will, however, drive slowly where children are known to behave in less than responsible ways. [↩]

This entry was posted on Friday, August 22nd, 2008 at 8:44 am and is filed under thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.