Viraj's Weblog

Today I saw a talk by Common Sense Media, which provides ratings and reviews of all sorts of media stuff as it relates to children. They provide recommendations as to what age a child should be to see Pirates of the Caribbean, browse myspace.com, etc. It was a great talk, and this company doesn't believe in censorship, which is a nice breath of fresh air for rules about what children should see.

It's rather amazing how far the media has come and how much it affects children. Think of all the profanity that is now perfectly acceptible to say on television compared with 20 years ago. Children grow up in a much different time with many different stimuli. The presenter showed a video mashup of things currently in PG-13 films, music videos, internet sites, and television. It's rather frightening what children have access to.

Think about it, when you were young and there was no internet, how difficult was it to get a Playboy magazine? It was all secretive, and very difficult for a young child to even be in contact with such things. Now a child on a computer has access to all of this and much, much more. He may even be GIVEN porn through spam. The problem comes down to access to information. If those Playboy mags were easily available to anyone in our day, then it would be equivalent to the ease of access to internet porn. What would we do in such a scenario? Well we would put down restrictions as to who can have access to the magazines. Sure the kid can go search in his dad's dresser, but it's still not as easy as internet porn.

But this solution fails with the internet. You cannot restrict children from accessing the internet, it will just never work. It is too easy to circumvent. Even if you never buy them a computer, computers are now so much part of society that restricting them at home will be next to useless.

Let's think about something else, like sex. What if sex was easily accessible to all underage people? Arguably it is already. Here is something that we can maybe correlate with internet access. We can't prevent them from having sex. It is freely, and easily, available. What's there to do? Well you can educate the child, and inform them about condoms and risks. Now the child has access to sex, but through education and prohylactics he/she can engage in sex safely. What's the equivalent of an internet condom?

The internet is information unbound. Of course we don't want children reading or learning about certain things until they are of a certain age. Hell, there may be information we feel shouldn't be accessible to ANYONE regardless of their age. But it may be too difficult a task to curtail a child's access to this information. Are you going to watch your child every hour of the day to make sure he's not going to myspace or wherever? Will you follow him to his friend's house as he does it there? Or at school? Surely this goal in unachievable.

There is a shift that is going on in this age. You can argue that children have much more access to much more dangerous things than we did in our childhood. By dangerous things, I mean dangerous influences. Information can be dangerous if the retriever does not yet know how to process that information. The only solution seems to be to try as hard as possible to protect children by educating them. Education must accompany free-reign access to information just as condoms must accompany free-reign access to sex. The internet condom, or rather media condom, must be worn before they go in.

It must be very hard to raise a child in this day and age. No parent can keep track of everything their child does. I think that openness is key. Talk about the taboo things with your children before they get to it.