Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, November 18, 1995 TAG: 9511200080
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-9 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DAVID D. SULLIVAN
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
The information highway today has millions of people who have connected their personal computers to telephone lines for the purpose of accessing the Internet. Roanoke city's public-school system is making plans to access it through a high-speed connection, directly into a wide-area network, hooking up the entire school system. This will allow all 29 schools in the system immediate and instantaneous communication with the World Wide Web, as well as other Internet services.
The Internet is a global "network of networks.'' It isn't governed by any entity. There are no limits or checks on the kind of information that is maintained by and is accessible to Internet users. The benefits of the information highway are many. Reference information such as news, weather, sports, stock quotes, movie reviews, encyclopedias and airline fares are readily available on-line. Users can conduct transactions such as trading stocks, making travel reservations, banking and shopping. Millions of people communicate through electronic mail (e-mail) with family and friends around the world, and others use public message boards to make new friends who share common interests. As an educational tool, users can learn about any topic, and can even take a college course.
As students, children use the Internet to participate in distance-learning activities, to ask questions of and consult with experts, to communicate with other students and individuals, and to find material to meet their educational and personal information needs. But because the Internet isn't constant and is an ever-changing environment, information available to children is also changing. It is, therefore, impossible to predict with certainty just exactly what information children might locate.
Accordingly, we "netheads" have known for years that sooner or later some pedophile would make use of a computer bulletin board to contact a child, and eventually communicate with that youngster with the intention of doing bodily harm. It then became only a matter of time before someone would stand before the U.S. Senate with an X-rated image downloaded from the Internet, raging indignantly about "public funds for porno highways.'' The demand for censorship and government control of the Internet was as sure to follow as winter follows autumn.
Still, we must not allow "Interpol" to start pulling people over on the information highway. While it's certainly true that we must think about ways of protecting our children from the easy availability of every kind of horrible information, censoring the net isn't the answer. It isn't just misguided, it's technically impossible. Internet pioneer John Gilmore has said, "The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it."
When the Internet was built, it was done so by the RAND Corp. with decentralization in mind. This means that if a 10-megaton nuclear weapon detonates in New York City, information can still travel from Washington to Moscow, even though a major communication link in New York has been removed. This also means that today a hacker in Paris can connect to Internet and dump pornographic files onto the Internet and anyone anywhere in the world can download these photographs.
So, what's the answer? We have to teach our children well. We have to give our children and our students the moral leadership required to make them understand that there's nonsense and evil in the world, and we have to provide them with knowledge and education so that they can make common-sense decisions when it comes to answering or not answering e-mail from a stranger, or joining a talk session with a bunch of weirdos discussing immoral and provocative material.
We would all like to be able to stop the information flow into our homes, whether it's in the form of inappropriate or annoying telephone calls, debasing television shows or plain old U.S. mail. But we cannot. Sooner or later our children will be exposed to everything from which we hoped to protect them, and all they will have left is their own morality that we taught them. If we have disregarded this responsibility, they will suffer. If we have done our job, they will prosper.
As Howard Rheingold put it:
"Teach your children to be politely but firmly skeptical about anything they see or hear on the Net. Teach them to have no fear of rejecting images or communications that repel or frighten them. Teach them to have a strong sense of their own personal boundaries, of their right to defend those boundaries physically and socially. Teach them that people aren't always who they present themselves to be in e-mail, and that predators exist.
``Teach them to keep personal information private. Teach them to trust you enough to confide in you if something doesn't seem right."
All kinds of people use computers and computer networks. But these same people make telephone calls, send mail and create television shows. Who for a second would argue that these forms of communication should be terminated? The question we have to ask is: How do we teach our children to live in a world where censorship is impossible?
David D. Sullivan of Roanoke is an instructional-technology trainer in the Roanoke city public schools.
by CNB