I was listening today to a program which went out on Radio 4 last night about the mass prevalence of porn on the internet. It seemed to be indicating that access to this material will somehow lead my generation, being the first to really have gone through adolescence with it, being either sexual devients who will beat up women because there is violent porn, or we will become addicted to the point where we won’t leave the house and form real relationships leading to the ultimate demise of society. The impression I really got, despite them wheeling out the stock public school ‘voices of youth’ to give their perspective, was that much of the program seemed to be about how many adults seem unable to deal with teen sexuality in a sensible way. Whenever I listen even to technologically literate adults talking about things like porn on the internet, their immediate answer is that they should block it from their twelve year old, for example. While I don’t totally disagree with the sentiment, I feel that it somewhat misses the point. Technological blocking is an attempt to avoid the awkward conversations. Personally, I wouldn’t want to talk about porn with my father, and I doubt he would want to with me, but there is an education issue. The knee-jerk response is not to deal with the issues, but really to do the technological equivalent of brushing them under the carpet. Out of sight, out of mind.
This approach has long been the favoured option of schools. Coming from St Paul’s, which under the stewardship of David Smith,is coming blinking into the light of a much less filtered internet, I had a fair degree of experience of coming up against, and going over, under or around, the web barriers. His argument, which I agree with, is that these barriers may put the minds of the staff and parents at ease, but they don’t actually address the issue, or indeed actually block anything for very long. The issue is, and always has been, education. During the course of the BBC program I listened to, they were talking with an exec from Microsoft who told the reporter that Windows (and OS X) have parental controls included, but they are turned off by default. The question was asked, why not have ‘kid safe’ computers on sale which have the controls turned on by default? The answer to me seems simple – these controls don’t really work. As I said they don’t block anything in a very robust way, but they also tend to be over-zealous about their blocking attempts. Again, at St Paul’s, they tried over and over to find a blocking solution which worked. Tom Turner, a current student and @dynamization on twitter, posted this today:
This kind of thing was a constant problem, and the incorrectly blocked sites where usually forwarded onto the IT Support who manually removed them from the blacklist, but that doesn’t change the fact that in this case a John Betjeman poem has been blocked under the category of “Swimsuit and Lingerie”. Are the parents at home, who aren’t even tech-savvy enough to go into Control Panel or System Preferences to turn on the blocking controls for themselves, really going to be able to be there to unblock every time a poem needed for English homework is blocked, and indeed would they know how?
At school this kind of thing was a constant pain in the arse. I know during my time, and no doubt still, a disproportionate amount of David’s time was taken up dealing with this kind of issue. Do we really want to be introducing this kind of crap into the home environment as well? It is about time the parents who, growing up in the ’60s and ’70s should hardly be shocked by kids wanting to explore sexuality, woke up and smelt the coffee. This kind of thing won’t be solved by a splash-screen telling you that ‘computer sez no’.
People three or four years younger than myself are even more accustomed to the internet. One of the stories mentioned in this BBC program was about a twelve year old girl in the US, who was prosecuted under child porn laws for taking a photograph of herself naked and sending it to friends. Now the fact that I think that the ruling is lunacy (I always thought those laws were to protect the child from exploitation, not to preserve moral beliefs) aside, I have no doubt that these kids have no idea that it is illegal to be looking at a picture of say a 14 year old, even if you are 14.
While blocking may be the simple solution, in my mind, it isn’t the right one.