The internet is wonder of modernity, but it is also a dark and sinister place just waiting to trap the unwary and innocent. Attitudes are often more shaped by the internet and its little brother social media than more traditional influences like the family and the school playground and this too has #MeToo implications.
Just to explain, what follows is a snippet of a WIP about #MeToo that I hope to get published one day.
Access is becoming an increasing challenge and threat and especially to children who seem to have media devices in their hands almost as soon as they are born and certainly by the time they are five or six. Many children are able to navigate to different videos on YouTube or other media platforms with great ease and older children with even greater finesse than their parents. Please, don’t misunderstand me, I am not saying per se, that children of this age have access to illicit sites through their own abilities or wish to explore such material. If and when children of such a tender age do have access it is usually inadvertent and as a consequence of somebody older leaving such material open on their screen.
In the past access to pornography was always a bit seedy, it meant going into certain kinds of shops or taking something off the top shelf of a magazine rack. There was always and element of embarrassment or fear of exposure for those seeking such materials and there was a relatively well enforced age limit.
While it wasn’t impossible for minors to have access to such materials it was definitely more difficult. Back in the day careless parents leaving a VHS tape laying around after the child had figured out to use the VCR or badly hidden printed content was about the limit of it.
The internet changed everything as illustrated in this short-potted history with the emphasis being on access.
At first it wasn’t so bad and responsible adults could still control access. Most people initially had internet access (but also DVD / VCD access) through a single desktop device often located in a communal area of the home such as the dining room. It was easy to catch, let’s say, a teenager trying to access such materials. It was even more obvious during the days of dial up before the advent broadband when the cost of premium sites was registered on the phone bill.
Then families started having more than once device in their home; which in reality meant that (predominantly) teenagers suddenly had internet-connected computers in their bedrooms. Sure; they used it to do their homework, but they had unfiltered access to the whole internet, good and bad.
Before we knew it laptops suddenly became affordable (c. 2005) and it was much easier to “shield” the screen and people quickly learnt that closing the lid was more than a little suspicious. It now meant that we could disappear into a little corner or even sit with the family who were engaged in watching TV, just so long as the screen wasn’t visible.
The final part of the evolution, to date, came with the combined technologies of the smartphone and mobile data. What was only accessible a few years ago on a shared computer often in a communal space was now available on a small screen that was fully mobile.
In many ways this is great, but with greater access, that was seemingly anonymous it was easy to drift off into those areas of the internet that are relevant to this discussion. A few years ago Conservative MP Neil Parrish was forced to resign after being caught looking at porn in the House of Commons. On the first occasion he claimed he was looking for tractors, but the web took him somewhere else.
This can happen – something like this happened to MamaRah a few years ago. Her mistake was to simply google “Jennifer Aniston” with an expectation to see some popular celebrity style photos of her on the red carpet or in some of her acting roles. I was sitting next to her at the time and, while I couldn’t see the screen, I saw her horrified reaction when she recoiled in disgust. I never actually saw the image but she did ask me if what she saw was even humanly possible.
Not sure how I am supposed to respond to that!
Whatever it was that she’d seem she was so shocked that she demanded that I immediately “clean” her computer because she is very much of the belief that once it is on your computer it stays there forever. In addition to clearing her internet history and temp files, I quickly Googled how to go about such a process and came across data scrubbers which could randomise 0s and 1s right at the base of the binary code or replace existing data with 0s or 1s. This would still look dodgy, as real data is not represented in such a way that literally nothing can be reconstructed from it, but at least it removed the offending image and that was good enough for her.
Similarly, I have been caught out. One occasion when I tried to go to my now abandoned Hotmail account for some reason, I was directed to a website that my browser thought I wanted to visit; something about ‘hot male’ and you can only imagine what I saw on my screen. I have also recently blogged on how DutchyFaucet’s adverts all too frequently lead to such content too.
All of this is of course inadvertent, but in Neil Parrish’s case it happened TWICE. He later claimed that the second occasion was “a moment of madness” and that “[his] crime, my most biggest crime [his English not mine!], is that on another occasion I went in a second time, and that was deliberate” (Source: Sky News Website).
I am not the moral police and it is not for me to judge what he watches and doesn’t watch – within the bounds of legality (defined as being produced by fully consenting adults 18+ without coercion and with full mental capacity), although I would question his motives in watching such content while in session in Parliament and whether this is the kind of person who the electorate wishes to represent their best interests.
Whatever the rights and wrongs, the point is that access is easy and there are no filters and that includes for young people too. Armed with smartphones there is little or no control on what they are viewing.
About twenty years ago a friend of mine who is also a mother told me what her then 10-year-old daughter Googled on her laptop and as I have already implied, I am no puritan who tries not to judge others. However, in this specific case, what she looked for is too disgusting to share and as far as I know such content is illegal (although I emphasise it did not include children which of course is the worst of the worst).
What was even more shocking was that apparently Google returned some specific results in line with the search.
And this is the problem. To repeat myself it is about access and how this shapes (particularly young) minds.
And I haven’t even got started on where we are now with deep fakes!
And so, on this note of concern, I finish with my usual final salutation to stay safe and well my friends.
