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owlectomyI cannot *believe* how paranoid the news is about teens and internet use. No personal web pages! Ever! Log off immediately if instant-messaged by a stranger!
When you're five, your parents tell you not to talk to strangers. And when you're older than five, you start to learn safe and appropriate ways of interacting with strangers so that you can live a normal life and not hide behind the couch twenty-four hours a day. It's the same way online. Anyone with a reasonable amount of maturity and half a brain can be taught the difference between putting half-naked pictures of yourself online whilst revealing your full name, school, and address, and having a little Sailor Moon fanpage with no personally revealing information.
(And then, of course, there's the issue that sexual assault by strangers is used as a smokescreen to distract from how much more common sexual abuse by acquaintances/relatives/authority figures is).
I guess it just gets on my nerves because, when I lived in the suburbs without a car, I didn't have many sources of entertainment besides the internet. I was allowed to use it completely unregulated from the time I was 14-ish--permissive father, mother who trusted me and didn't know anything about technology--and I never did anything stupider than being less than nice on some AOL message boards. That's how I learned HTML; that's how, by trial and error, I learned reasonable amounts of etiquette. And I'm very glad to have learned those things.
It just seems as if people increasingly need to believe that they're capable of stopping every bad thing from happening, if only they take enough precautions.
When you're five, your parents tell you not to talk to strangers. And when you're older than five, you start to learn safe and appropriate ways of interacting with strangers so that you can live a normal life and not hide behind the couch twenty-four hours a day. It's the same way online. Anyone with a reasonable amount of maturity and half a brain can be taught the difference between putting half-naked pictures of yourself online whilst revealing your full name, school, and address, and having a little Sailor Moon fanpage with no personally revealing information.
(And then, of course, there's the issue that sexual assault by strangers is used as a smokescreen to distract from how much more common sexual abuse by acquaintances/relatives/authority figures is).
I guess it just gets on my nerves because, when I lived in the suburbs without a car, I didn't have many sources of entertainment besides the internet. I was allowed to use it completely unregulated from the time I was 14-ish--permissive father, mother who trusted me and didn't know anything about technology--and I never did anything stupider than being less than nice on some AOL message boards. That's how I learned HTML; that's how, by trial and error, I learned reasonable amounts of etiquette. And I'm very glad to have learned those things.
It just seems as if people increasingly need to believe that they're capable of stopping every bad thing from happening, if only they take enough precautions.