[1442] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Re: So what is the answer?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (sean mclinden)
Tue Oct 8 19:39:52 1991
Date: Tue, 8 Oct 91 19:07:44 -0400
From: sean@dsl.pitt.edu (sean mclinden)
To: comp-academic-freedom-talk@eff.org, edtjda@magic322.chron.com
Cc: com-priv@psi.com, connie.stout@tenet.edu, cosndisc@bitnic.BITNET,
> In the two years since I started looking, I still haven't found an
> answer that addresses everyone's concerns on this topic. How does
> one introduce Internet to children in a socially acceptable, responsible
> fashion?
Is this an inappropriate focus of concern? How do you introduce children
to the telephone, television, magazines, or any other communications platform?
If school boards are so concerned about Internet (or "Tom Sawyer" or MTV)
why don't they (and you) try spending a few hours on a school playground
or in the parking lot (or local motels) after a junior-senior prom? Media,
whatever medium you choose, is inherently amoral. People who expect it to
be otherwise are deluding themselves. It is the content which gives it
meaning and the meaning which determines the value.
What is pornography? It is, I believe, the presentation of information in
such a way as to obscure or corrupt it's meaning or value to a society that
has values. It is distortion of the truth where truth is a factor of both
content and context.
We are exposed to it all of the time. Much of commercial advertising could
be considered pornographic but most of us are intelligent enough to recognize
the untruths and ignore them. I believe, for example, that much of the
commericial advertising aimed at trying to convince consumers that what they
are doing by buying this garbage bag or that container is "environmentally
friendly" when this is known to be a gross overstatement (or flat out lie)
is pornographic. It is even worse when we cannot appreciate the lie, such
as when an unscrupulous journalist distorts the truth or lies about the
veracity of their reporting or uses the context of journalism to advance
a personal point of view rather than objectively reporting the truth.
Pornography is most effective as a tool for shaping human behavior when it
is not recognized for what it is.
In order to appreciate that something is pornographic we have to appreciate
the truth. To do that we need to be educated. On what do we rely for education?
Certainly not on people who claim to be the one source of truth, for how do
we validate their claims? The task of educating our citizenry has outstripped
out ability to do this with controlled personal interaction, alone. Parents,
alone, cannot do this. Teachers, as well, cannot.
We need access to the media and tools to facilitate this access. We need
to make this access affordable, so that it does not become something which
can only be had by a few people (this lack of affordability is what concerns
me about commercialization of the Internet and is why I am, personally, in
favor of the vacation of the ill-considered order restaining the RBOCs from
offering information services and of efforts to insure open, affordable,
services such as CIX).
We need to continue to support and expand our support for communication of
all forms and the ability of ourselves and others to openly question our
presentation of the "facts" and our analysis of their importance.
In response to your question I would turn it around. I would question anyone's
right to determine which media to which I may have access at any stage in my
education. It is the responsibility of educators, whether they be parents or
teachers, to provide the appropriate context in which to interpret communi-
cation, be it Huck Finn, alt.sex.pictures, MTV, or C-SPAN and if they cannot
or will not do that then we hire someone who can. But the failure of our
educational system to provide us with the tools to evaluate this new media
should not, in any way, given it license to restrict our access to it.
Sean McLinden
Medical Applications Group
Carnegie Mellon University
Information Technology Center
and
Information Networking Institute
