The Internet Guard Dog Essay, Research Paper
Who is supposed to be the watchdog on the net? This question will raise the temperature in almost any room. The government already has to many regulations on lots of things, who wants Uncle Sam?s hand in the web. Some of the regulations that are applied are there for specific reasons. Those protect the people before the damage to say a young child posing for porn can be done. Those people that would be trying to regulate the Internet could be going after those sick, pathetic petafiles that float around in the child chat rooms. In my opinion, the parents should be the ones that are responsible for what their children view on the Internet. The net itself can be very valuable if used as a tool for learning. In the group Families Against Internet Censorship, they understand the concept of parental filtering (Censorship 2000). One of the families uses primarily the Internet to home-school their children. When a child signs on to the web, he or she has almost infinite resources right at the ends of their fingertips. Where else can you maximize the worlds resources from inside the comforts of home. I know that a young teenager can productively use this information. I have been using the net for about eight years for my reports and personal knowledge quests. My father would check on me every now and again to make sure I was on task. Not only was he keeping what I viewed pg13, he was helping me use different search engines and being my troubleshooter until I could surf the web by myself. Lots of the children now days are just tuned loose with a computer and not checked on until suppertime or bedtime. With that much freedom come temptation, this leads to the children looking up porn, explosives, or something else that their parents would not want them to look at.In my opinion, pornography should be allowed on the Internet as long as it is within legal bounds that are already established. I personally do not sit up all night trying to see some naked body in a freaky position. Nevertheless, I do not have a problem if my neighbor looks at pornographic material all day long as long as he does not pressure me with it. You never know where an online neighbor is from. The Internet is neither owned or ran by the United States. Many people view the human body as a work of art. The United States especially makes a big deal out of nudity. In Eastern Europe the children will not even were bathing suits until they reach the age around puberty. What gives our government the right to police the world based on our views?Yesterday I was watching some television with a female friend of mine when the talk show Sally came on. The show happened to be about children and the Internet. In this ten to twelve-year-old chat room, this ten-year-old girl chatted with someone across the net for a little while. After the girl had talked to the person in the chat room for about a week, she gave the person her telephone number. Later in the week, the little girl found out the person on the other end of the computer was an older man. This child molester was caught having sexual activity with his eight-year-old neighbor in the state of Alabama. On another chat room, the mother of the ten-year-old went to scout out another chat room and found a petafile online admitting to being a pervert to the young children. On this same episode, an undercover cop posed as a fourteen-year-old female. The cop?s bait was immediately taken by a sixteen-year-old male. Within a few minutes the male had already offered alcohol to who he thought was a fourteen year old female. The next thing the male brought up in the conversation was sexual offers. So within twenty minutes this police officer has already been offered sex and alcohol. This officer, Detective Mike Harris, recently went to the middle school where he resides in Jefferson County Colorado. He was speaking to the kids about all the dangers on the net, and ran across some crazy statistics. Out of 185 students, 145 of them have the Internet in their household. Thirty-five of these children had access to the web in their room (Sally 2000). This makes it even more difficult for the parents to regulate these children?s Internet privileges. Uncle Sam has no business in adding more regulations to the net. That bear has his hand too far in the honey jar already. The Internet can be one of the most valuable information tools there is in the world today. This valuable tool can also carry very explicit material. If parents do not pay attention to what their children are downloading, this explicit content may weave its way across the web and into your house. How many parents would pay a monthly fee to just hand their child a chainsaw and turn them loose on an unsuspecting world? I do not know a single parent who would even think of letting this hypothetical situation proceed. A chainsaw can also be viewed as a valuable tool if used to clear land or clear a road of fallen trees. If misused this can be a very dangerous piece of equipment. Keeping this in mind, picture the web as a very important tool. The Internet also has infinite knowledge paths waiting to be blazed by a curious user (Exon 435). The dark side of this tool can be more damaging on the inside of a young child?s mind, than the chainsaw could possibly do. This paper was written to awaken those who would let our rights be infringed on because of their own negligence. The computer skill level by some of the children of today far exceeds the level of their parents. This also causes parents to be shocked at what their children may be looking at when they are not in the room. If parents would take five minutes out of the day to look in the temp folder or the history in the navigator, they would know exactly what their children have been viewing. If you can regulate your son or daughters use of the net, then why violate other peoples? rights? I would just like to keep the information superhighway open and without government restrictions so that I can put my car on cruise control and ride all day long.