Safety and Virtual Girls

Again, I've been wanting to touch on this theme. I did an experiment. When "child pornography" is Googled, the first page consists of either of definitions of what it is, or articles which tell stories of sting operations or rampant depravity. This article establishes the problem as local and the efforts to stop it "like shooting fish in a barrel." To a degree, I'm sure this is true, but this is only talking about its dissemination, and likewise, most articles are like this. It is uncommon to see child pornography articles written with the perspective of the survivor, and from the results of this little experiment, it appears that those testimonials are only used to bolster the arguments of activists who are staunchly anti-porn in general, using the mere possibility of child exploitation to rule out the capacity for porn's responsible, empowering creation and use. Conversely, this article, which cites a study that encourages the decriminalization of digitally manipulated images of child porn to reduce actual sex crimes, seems to view the Internet as a medium of protecting children, if one fraught with moral dilemmas. It seems no one can agree, but then again, are they even asking the subjects? An image represents a person. It is attached to a person, and can follow them for the rest of their lives. I'm not convinced that sites that relish the exploitation of minors are everywhere, but they certainly exist, and we must contextualize their existence not within the scheme of possible crimes that the images may encourage, but rather, the victimization that happens by the images existing at all. Those girls (and boys) should be kept at the forefront, not unknown hypotheticals.

Internet safety

Our last unit stressed Internet safety, or lack thereof, and shortly afterward, I stumbled on this video. It's an extremely dated Internet safety video, the kind that was clearly used as an educational tool in schools to encourage kids to be smart in their digital pursuits. I understand the sentiment, of course, and think it's valuable, but I find it rather silly that we've always had a tenuous relationship with technology in this respect. Digital literacy is almost obligatory in this day and age for success, regardless of the field one endeavors to go into, yet there is always a sinister edge to it, the potential for a mustachioed older man to entrap a child, or for any unsuspecting user to be confronted with a barrage of unwelcome images. This class has forced me to reflect on the ways that not only is technology constructed, so fraught with contradiction, but also, how that lends itself to the way my parent's generation has become skeptical of safety in the modern world. There's this resounding message in all my classes, it would seem, that the postmodern era has engendered a longing for a simpler time, and politics of that ilk have become more prevalent as well. The voices of young people, who have never known a life outside of this fragmented, digitized world are all but lost, and this silly video, which encompasses many things I would be very surprised to hear a child say, is indicative of that.

OMG and LOL added to the dictionary

I thought this article would be a great jumping off point for this new blog, which I should have, in good conscience, started ages ago. One of my personal realizations in this class is the way that academia misunderstands and misappropriates youth culture. While this is an excellent example of the far-reaching potential for this culture to enact distinct forms of change, even in things as basic as language, to be frank, I think that most young people (that is, younger than me) would think that codifying their chatspeak as "culturally significant" would take the enjoyment out of having what was once almost a secret language, understood only within the confines of a social group. Yes, I understand that "OMG" and "LOL" are terms even most adults know and may even use now, but they did not originate in that fashion, and I think acknowledging and, in effect, canonizing these "words" signifies a decline in standards for language, as they aren't even slang terms, but rather, silly acronyms that have pervaded every aspect of daily life. Since the beginning of this class, I've struggled with the idea that the Internet provides an outlet for girls to conform and dumb themselves down more through certain social behaviors, but also by adopting completely bastardized forms of language, and honestly, I find the whole thing unsettling. Basically, I want this blog to be about that disconnect, the way youth culture constructs the Internet and the way adults do.