cryptoanarchy.wiki

Arise, you have nothing to lose but your barbed wire fences!

1994-07-31 - Re: Children and the Net

Header Data

From: “Perry E. Metzger” <perry@imsi.com>
To: jgostin@eternal.pha.pa.us
Message Hash: ce9d871101025844aa1d245ea98153617e257534f0815dea0550e356f478a234
Message ID: <9407311612.AA06271@snark.imsi.com>
Reply To: <940729193326Q2sjgostin@eternal.pha.pa.us>
UTC Datetime: 1994-07-31 16:12:32 UTC
Raw Date: Sun, 31 Jul 94 09:12:32 PDT

Raw message

From: "Perry E. Metzger" <perry@imsi.com>
Date: Sun, 31 Jul 94 09:12:32 PDT
To: jgostin@eternal.pha.pa.us
Subject: Re: Children and the Net
In-Reply-To: <940729193326Q2sjgostin@eternal.pha.pa.us>
Message-ID: <9407311612.AA06271@snark.imsi.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain



Jeff Gostin says:
> jdd@aiki.demon.co.uk (Jim Dixon) writes:
> 
> > The Internet is a wild and exciting place.  You want your children to
> > get to know it.  But you would also like a way to build little fences
> > between them and some things that they are just too young to deal with.
> > How do you do it?
> 
>      In my eyes, it's really quite easy: Don't let your children use
> Internet UNTIL AND UNLESS you feel they are emotionally stable and mature
> enough to handle any kind of message that comes across the net.

There are other simple strategies, like using a service like Prodigy
that censors its messages, or starting a service for like minded
parents that censors the material children can access. You don't
need change the whole world to alter what a small minority read.

I'm not a believer in the notion of keeping your children "protected"
because the world is a dangerous place and I feel that you produce
children unable to cope with the world if they don't know what is in
it. At the same time, I feel Mr. Zooks has the right to raise his
children as hot house flowers if he likes, and he can accomplish his
goals perfectly well without censoring us, which I feel would be
unacceptable even if Mr. Zooks could not raise his children unexposed
to the world without censorship. Luckily, both sets of goals are
achievable.

Perry

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