I was recently asked if I did “…everything (I) can to protect children.” It was a strange question. The last time I’d done anything to protect children, Mothra threatened Kyoto and I was all that stood between that mighty insectoid demon and 12 Japanese kids in sailor outfits. It reminded be that I hadn’t created ICRA labels for the blogs and, later than I should have, I’ve now fixed it.
ICRA (the Internet Content Rating Association) is a body which attempts to facilitate webmaster responsibility, and dissuade the government from imposing crummy legislation. Labeling your site - and the labels aren’t just for porn sites - enables parental blocks and filters to identify your subject matter, giving guardians/parents/the government control over who sees your content.
In reality, most kids know more about technology than their parents, and these ‘blocks’ are more feel-good than failsafe. That doesn’t make them useless though, and for very young children they’re pretty much 100% effective (toddler googling for Barney snuff again? Problem solved). You can make your own ICRA labels, and bask in their smug glow, here.
I’m sorry to say I don’t agree with labelling for sites that don’t feature visual explicit content. It’s too ‘Tipper Gore’ for me. I didn’t like it when every CD shipped to Australia had those goddamned black and white labels for ‘language’ after the ruckus made over the minor few people who were ‘influenced’ by heavy metal music (they were unhinged to begin with, the music was just beside the point) to commit crimes. Now, it’s gone overboard. Label this, that and the other.
Ultimately, on the home front, it’s up to parents to actually monitor their kid’s usage on the Internet, as opposed to placing a PC in the ‘privacy’ of their bedrooms and giving them net access. I just feel it’s a cop out for people to ‘have’ to label their sites even though the content may be more literary than visual (in terms of written fiction).
Although I believe governments have the capability to censor, I’ll never freely give any government the ‘freedom’ to filter my site the way they like by ‘labelling’ it.
Nope.
In addition, I think it’s not just governments Sam, a corporation can completely censor a blog, as the following shows. This story hardly was discussed in the Sex Blogosphere but nonetheless it’s an important story:
http://www.bloggersblog.com/cgi-bin/bloggersblog.pl?bblog=108062
I just feel that although this is the 21st Century, there are some things that make it feel like it’s regressing.
It all reminds me of being a curious child, and yes, regardless of all the prohibitions, rules and so on, I’d still find out what things were. The onus is place on ‘us’ to ‘protect’ children, but the reality is, this is the parent’s responsibility, not mine. I’m a parent myself and I don’t permit my child to sit at the PC logged onto the net without my supervision. That’s about it.
Anastasia, I see it as a matter of intent. It’s very easy for governments to filter content without our help.
The easiest filters are a brick-wall, which only let a specific range of sites through, and filtering based on keywords is also easy. The problem is that these filters make mistakes. I see labeling my content as ‘good citizenship’. It makes it easier for a librarian who wants to provide access to a teen-rape crisis site to do so, without letting through porn they don’t.
As the nature of my blogs is clear to anyone who sees them, I have little to gain by presenting them as less sexual than they are. Any attempt to avoid being frank about my content would feel like shame to me, and I’m not ashamed of anything I’m involved in.
Sam, your blogs, from what I’ve seen, are presented in good taste. That’s what I think, that’s what brings me back for more. It’s fair to say that sites with teens etc, do exist, and those types are usually more ‘in one’s face’, then yes. Today I was thinking about it at lunch (hope I didn’t come across as too blunt, but lately here in Australia there’s a tendency for panic, our latest debate is RU486 believe it or not) and wondered about the filtering software that works on the basis of swear words and other words to redirect an under aged user elsewhere.