Thursday, October 9, 2008

Cyberspace, The Final Frontier!

I'm taking a course on Computer Crime.

Last class the professor, though such a title is a stretch, showed an episode of Frontline detailing the dangers of youth on the Internet, the big, scary, Internet.

The special touched on cyber predation as well as cyber bullying, the dangers of a large amount of personal information freely available in cyberspace as well as the escapism teens are finding in cyberspace.

..... duh.

I'm sorry, maybe it's just me, maybe I'm just jaded having grown up as a member of the "Entitlement Generation" up to my eyebrows in technology but for the love of god how is this a shock to anyone?

Parents, refuse to actively participate in the raising of their children, their children naturally seek a social network for support, as they find the cyber domain to be as comfortable, if not more so, then real space they are obviously going to move into the cyber realm. Is this what scares parents? Or is it the parents technical incompetence? Should the fact that parents simply can not, will not, choose to not supervise their child's activities online result in punishment of the child? Is MySpace now going to have to report to every parent when their thirteen year old daughter is dancing in front of a web cam?

How can they be so oblivious? How can parents of teens in this day and age not know? How can a parent be surprised at finding scantily clad pictures of their daughter online when by the age of thirteen she has most likely had one or more sexual partners? How can traditional values and norms ever hope to be applied to a generation that simply does not exist in the same space as previous generations?

Cyberspace is the new rock and roll, the excesses of rock are merely finding a new home in cyberspace, the escapes most of the last generation found in concerts and music my generation finds in MySpace, it makes even less sense to fight it then fighting rock and roll did for our grandparents.

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