Let’s Talk About Sex

Nothing’s safe today…

“What is pornography to some people may be simply mainstream advertising to others; what is morally wrong to some may be entirely acceptable to others; what is legal to show to minors in one community may be regarded as wholly inappropriate by those in another community; and what counts as responsible choice according to one set of values may be irresponsible behavior according to a different set of values.  Approaches taken to protect children should be flexible enough to honor that diversity” (Halavais, 191).  This is a quote from chapter 11 in the book, which states why it’s so hard to regulate the Internet.  However, these are also the problems when attempting to regulate other widespread material.  Overall, many question what the “right” way to protect our children is.  I believe that in order to protect them we need to draw lines between acceptable and unacceptable material for children to view by taking views that lay somewhere in-between extremely liberal and extremely conservative, if we are going to attempt to regulate the Internet.

However these extreme lines become very blurred when it comes to children viewing what could be inappropriate material.  Even extremely liberal people would take more conservative views when it came to deciding what was appropriate for children.  And these lines would draw even more towards the conservative side if the adult had a younger child.  Therefore what seems to be a good solution isn’t the right solution after all.  It’s been suggested that educating parents so they can educate their children is an alternative to setting community standards online.

If we teach parents how to talk to their children about what is, and could potentially be on the Internet, they should be able to relay a strong message to their children about what’s right and what’s wrong.  This would not only eliminate the guessing of whose community standards the internet should be based on, but would also allow parents to determine what their children should and should not view.  This is somewhat done by parental filters today, but to be realistic we can’t filter out everything.  Therefore an educated parent and child would be the best solution to this problem.  This could also be aided by filters in order to help children determine what is right and wrong.  However, parents shouldn’t solely rely on technology in order to protect children.

With any technology there are glitches.  Maybe a site that spells Disney the wrong way would bring up pornography, and maybe filters aren’t advanced enough to catch the misspelling yet.  Or maybe filters are better than that.  Maybe that would catch the misspelling and realize that this was an inappropriate site.  However, how do these filters even determine what is allowed and not allowed?  My guess is that they have people go online and search for things that children would typically search for and then view most of the top results; any of the results which allow access to porn would be placed on a list and then this list would be put into the parental filters.  But this is not fail proof either.  If parental filters work this way then parents are forced to continually get updates, especially since many new WebPages are created a day.

With all this in mind, it seems like there isn’t a solution to this problem.  However, a combination of a couple of the different solutions would allow for a safer internet for our children, although this internet wouldn’t be completely safe, because there are very few things that are completely safe today.