Also, I'm sick and tired of "child porn" including 14-18 year olds. It isn't child porn. They arn't children. They are teenagers. Some of them have been having sex for years. It should be a different offence to posses and it should not be an offence to posses if you were in a loving relationship (and similar in age, a 14 year old and a 16 or 17 year old, not a 40 year old and a 14 year old).
You know those dirty letters you got from your sweetheart when you were 17? Sexting is the same damn thing.
Also, to all you folks on here saying that this is all fear mongering to take away or rights, you're missing the larger point here which is that the recent cultural shift with the prevalence of handheld computing has a lot of negative side effects and we need to rethink the norms. It is very rude to sit at the dinner table with people and be interacting with your mobile device rather than your real life companions. It wouldn't have been OK for a parent to sit at the dinner table having a phone call with colleagues back then and just because mobile Internet makes it silent it's still not OK.
That is just one example in a long list of things related to mobile computing that are considered OK but are actually rude or unhealthy.
One possible rethinking of the norms would be to worry less about teenagers, letting them sext if that's their thing, and advising them to not let societal abuse (e.g. bullying) get to them.
Scenario: a teenager sends a nude picture to a friend and the picture becomes public.
Possible solutions:
1. We keep teenagers from sexting, and people from seeing pictures that teenagers sexted.
2. We learn to not abuse teenagers who sexted and had their pictures leaked.
The latter is harder, but it's better long term. You can force people to not do what might harm them somehow, but you should look at the fundamentals: why do people suffer consequences when they sext? Is it because of the sexting itself, or the reaction people have to it?
> I'm very upset that this is the top comment on here. 14 year old teenagers are definitely children and they do need to be protected by law from predators. Just because they are old enough to have children of their own doesn't make them adults. Is not OK for sites or individuals to be collecting sexual images of children and distributing them.
Age is a spectrum. A better definition of, say, a 16 year old would be "not quite an adult, not quite a child". They're closer to adulthood than to childhood, but still don't have some of the baggage of adulthood. Talk to a 16 year old and you'll find out that they don't want that lack of baggage to keep them from enjoying the benefits of being treated like adults. I doubt having a line drawn that says you're not an adult until you're 18 years old, and until then you're still a child will keep working in this century. It worked when social dynamics between teenagers and adults were different.
The post you're responding to was splitting the spectrum into at least three parts, children | teenagers | adults, while you're arguing for children | adults - or at least that's how it looks. But I think you're on the wrong track there. Something that is closer to modelling a spectrum is better than a binary distinction, and is less likely to give rise to asinine laws / enforcement, like prosecuting teenagers for self-production of child porn.
I appreciate your point about the social effects of ubiquitous handheld computing but frankly I grew up constantly being told to go outside or talk to people when I preferred to read. Being present in body only is not a new thing.
Your children will be different, your grandchildren moreso, their children will be as different from you as you are from the median Saudi. We're living in the future and assuming trends continue our descendants will be libertine aliens.
I agree with your point about a shifting culture requiring adjustment. But you should recognise that rudeness is just a cultural norm that shifts with geography and time - what you consider rude (phone at the table) is perfectly acceptable in my family. In fact we almost never ate at the table, and rarely all together, but we're a very closely bonded family. To assert your version of politeness as a requirement is arrogance.
I think teenagers still make mistakes and I do not support photos of them being in general circulation in any form. I am upset at a boyfriend getting charged with CP possession when his girlfriends parents find out that they are sexting.
I also am against photos of teenagers getting distributed, but some teenagers look for teenage porn, and it shouldn't be as big of an offence as actual CP.
1) Not a teenager-specific problem. I'll quickly and unobtrusively answer texts only if they're related to plans for later in the evening. If my mom gets a call from her mother or sister, she'll take it at the dinner table and talk for over an hour while expecting the rest of the family to immediately cease our conversations so she can hear clearly. But it's me who shouldn't be allowed to have a phone?
2) That's pretty easily addressed by parents setting expectations for dinner as a sacred time. Don't want to put your phone down, don't eat. This is not a reason for regulation, changes on the part of manufacturers, or for teenagers not to have phones at all.
Everybody should be protected by law from predators. Including you. The claim was that what isn't needed is "protection" by law from recording activities that people willfully perform anyway.
This has nothing to do with the internet and everything to do with parenting they use their phone at the diner table because their allowed it's up to their parents to teach their children manners , respect, values and everything they think would help them in adult life.
This is the result of parents ignoring their children period.
The internet is not a play ground but the same way we don't build a fenced walk way from our house to the school our children attend we shouldn't be fencing off the internet.
It's not going to protect them, anybody can jump over a fence to abduct a child and the same way anybody can bypass a porn filter.
They need to grow up and this is part of it.
Right, and whose responsibility is it to make sure that children grow up knowing using their mobile phone at the dining table is wrong?
Much akin to "when we were kids we rode in the front seat without seat belts on, we turned out fine", and several other versions of that phrase.
I don't think it's a valid argument at all.
I watched all the porn I could get my hands on and turned out fine is evidence. It's not conclusive or anything but you wouldn't see it in a world where porn was the devil. The below articles certainly don't support demonisation of porn.
http://maggiemcneill.files.wordpress.com/2012/04/pornography...
http://www.hawaii.edu/PCSS/biblio/articles/1961to1999/1999-p...
Why not?
I mean the porn of 50 years ago seems tame by todays standards. Exposing children to such adult themes before they have even fully developed can't be a good thing.
Have you ever met a teenager? They're fucking idiotic. That's why we don't let them drink alcohol or vote or get married or have sex or join the army or a bunch of other stuff.
> You know those dirty letters you got from your sweetheart when you were 17? Sexting is the same damn thing.
No it isn't. A dirty letter is a dirty letter. A photo sent via sms has lasting consequences. Youth don't understand consequences, that's why we need to keep reminding them that anything they put on the Internet will stay there forever.
Partially because being protected from consequences of their actions, they can afford being idiotic.
Such felony convictions will have far more ramifications that the act itself ever could.
I've met plenty of idiotic adults, and I've met plenty of non-idiotic teenagers.
If "idiocy" is the appropriate criterion for determining how people should be disparately treated by the law, then let's develop a precise definition of "idiotic", so we can directly determine whether someone is an idiot or not, and stop using other, inconsistently correlated variables a proxy.
Most are clueless, and lacks experience to deal with basic stuff as adults, for sure. But no way all teenagers are idiotic.
Also, everyone makes mistakes. The problem is that one idiotic action can be now recorded and distributed FOREVER.
In some cultures, healthy and loving relationships between teenagers are beautiful. The emotional drama that follows - which advocates for infantilization use to say teenagers cannot be trusted to handle relationships - is part of growing up and learning to be a person. The idea that this is wrong, idiotic, deserving of punishment, immoral, or indicative of bad role models reflects a specific view of religious morality that not everyone shares. Teaching people to be ashamed of who they are and what they wan't isn't necessarily the best approach.
It's a fascinating cultural shift, and the religious right is fighting hard to stay in the 50s, but I think we're slowly moving forward. Then again, I was raised by atheist liberals, and we're not exactly popular.
To the extent this is true, its not the actual 1950s, but a mythical image of the 1950s created later, that's mostly associated with that particular time because its a distorted image of what the world was like prior to the supposed liberal reengineering of society in the 1960s and beyond. (And probably because at the time it started to coalesce, "the 1950s" was an easily-romanticized childhood time of the audience the image was meant to appeal to.)
Which "50s" are you referring to?
If I'm honest and I think back to the playground when I was younger, I am sure my understanding of what's right and wrong would be different (worse in my opinion) than they are today.
On the other-hand I'm in favour of free-speech, but then I also think banning kids from disruptive influences (alcohol, smoking) is also an effective means of keeping kids safe until they can take full responsibility for their actions.
Nonetheless, I think it's worth entertaining the hypothesis that in many ways the internet is like candy for your brain, and constant exposure might have subtle -- perhaps not yet fully recognized or appreciated -- effects on our cognition. We're running a vast uncontrolled experiment, and when things go wrong we (tech elites) tend to dismiss it with some variation of "Well, they had mental health issues or a parental problems or they would have been bullied anyway etc... etc... etc... It couldn't have been the internet."
The problem is that these are the same sorts of arguments that have been deployed in the face of every technological advance. "It's not that video games are addictive, it's that people already prone to addiction choose to become addicted to video games. 100 years ago they would have been addicted to whist."
I find this to be rather unpersuasive, generally, but I'm honestly also at a loss to articulate a compelling counterargument of my own. I have vague misgivings and a handful of anecdotes and not a lot of sound science.
Eventually the evidence was so irrefutable, and there were enough "casualties," that most reasonable people were forced to accept it.
This seems like a pattern that repeats itself. It begins with anecdotal evidence, followed by a long period of scientific research, then propaganda campaigns and eventual acceptance.
We're currently seeing it, about halfway through the curve, in the food industry with sugar. It's also happened previously with lead, seatbelts, asbestos, gambling, mercury, alcohol & driving, cholesterol, tanning booths, etc.
And now, perhaps, it's starting on the effect of information consumption. I use the term "information consumption" because it seems to be about much more than just teenagers and their phones.
[1] http://farm7.staticflickr.com/6149/6012309554_2c177196a8_z.j...
Tobacco companies actively engaged in a campaign of misinformation. They deliberately spread confusion about science.
> The problem is that these are the same sorts of arguments > that have been deployed in the face of every technological > advance
I agree and at the risk of sounding like my parents, I think the internet is different. Never before has their been a technology so all encompassing and so powerful (and dangerous).
If I wanted to look at pictures of girls when I was a horny teen, I had the bra section of the JC Penny catalog. The jump from that to the type of online porn that exists today is pretty big. Add to the fact that online porn is so much more accessible than visiting a porno shop, it's no wonder kids can fall into it more easily.
There seems to be a lot of paranoia around this issue, but observe that there have been HUGE ranges of how humanity has handled sexual content over the last few thousand years around the globe, and generally "we've turned out ok." This is a question that answering empirically will be VERY difficult, due to the sheer complexity of the human development process and the number of confounding variables, and I think a degree of faith needs to be had in the resiliency of our species and social structure to adapt.
I think most of the people understands that Rambo is not a good example of a real life soldier, or High School is not similar to Howarts. Equally, I think most of the people understands that porn is not a good representation of real life (nor romantic comedies a good representation of real life relationships, which is also another interesting example of arts influencing life, but I digress). Of course, if we don't discuss those issues with a more realistic approach, I guess there are some people that can miss the point and get bad assumptions and expectations.
Yes, we do. We also need a definition of "too much". For too many people, "too much" means "more than I prefer."
>If I wanted to look at pictures of girls when I was a horny teen, I had the bra section of the JC Penny catalog.
Those pictures fulfill the same purpose as looking at a girl with no clothes. The motivation was the same.
>The jump from that to the type of online porn that exists today is pretty big
You know what's an even bigger jump? Going from looking at pictures to actually seeing a real naked female, or actually having sex. That's as "hardcore" as it gets for a person, no? Yet everyone manages, forever throughout human history, often with no intermediate steps of seeing pictures of women. Crazy, I know.
But this isn't an invalid argument in discussions like this.
We're not looking at questions that pertain to intervene into the population aggregations here; we're talking about how we should approach the use of law to into the particulars of specific individuals' lives. "Data" may not be the plural of "anecdote", but the context in which we're attempting to make judgments here is the context that anecdotes, rather than data, most directly describe.
The fact that people can say "I did X and I'm okay" proves that there isn't a purely deterministic relationship between X, whatever it is, and bad results, and this is a valid argument against top-down, universalized restrictions on X.
> I have vague misgivings and a handful of anecdotes and not a lot of sound science.
Science addresses "is" questions. There are valid "is" questions involved in this discussion, and it's entirely appropriate to rely on science to answer them.
But the fundamental topic at hand here discussion is an "ought" question, not an "is" one, and "ought" questions are outside the scope of science.
It does, actually. Read Nicholas Carr's 'The Shallows' [0], it's a pretty decent book about the subject. It also starts off with comparing our usage of the internet with the rise of reading - you know, books and the like. History lesson; humans needed to adapt their brains to be able to read attentively for longer periods of time. The book contrasts that with the ADD nature of the internet, and yet, indicates how it's actually going back to where we were before. Or just a change similar to when books became publicly accessible.
tl;dr, yes there is a change, but I don't think it's necessarily good or bad; just different. And shocking / to be resisted by the older generation, just as how their parents were shocked and resisting the Beatles and similar long-haired freaks. :p
[0]: http://www.amazon.com/The-Shallows-Internet-Doing-Brains/dp/...
Teenagers have their own tastes in what the internet provides, and that interests/excites them, through social media, and other specific sites (like ask.fm). Nothing around this is new. Saying we should protect the poor teenagers is very demeaning to a group that are becoming adults, and protecting them by censorship helps no one in our society.
[/faux history teacher]
The mistake some members of the adult generation make, and have always made, is thinking that, or acting as though (and that is an easy cop out), the current teen generation is fundamentally different to their own.
Having said that, I'm not sure the discussion is advanced much by either highlighting incredibly extreme cases or cases that just happen to involve technology (being sent down from Oxford for dissolute behaviour has a long history).
After seeing some of my friends fall prey to porn addiction, I think the sheer amount of porn on the internet is a problem. When porn was something you had to go get on your own, you were limited to a small selection. However, now new and harder materials are avalible instantly, and it creates a feedback loop where people can't have sex without it.
Really, a better answer would be to discuss pornography addiction as part of the sexual education curriculum, but too many people would consider it "teaching children porn".
Sort of like how DARE teaches children drugs?
> the program was sometimes counterproductive in some populations, with those who graduated from D.A.R.E. later having higher than average rates of drug use
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_Abuse_Resistance_Education...
I went back to verify this and couldn't find it (!). Until I searched for "gang" instead... That's when I found The Guardian had changed the wording in the last few hours! If you scroll down to the bottom you'll find this:
"The standfirst to this article was amended on 12 September 2013. It originally referred to a girl who "let herself be gang-raped" to get her BlackBerry back. The misrepresented the text of the piece, which says she allowed herself to be sexually assaulted."
So, go ahead and blame technologists for allowing the internet to cater to our more prurient interests, but the newspaperpeople seem to the ones directly responsible.
The internet doesn't have a morality, it's a tool and usage is defined clearly by the user. The fact that more teenage boys are accessing pornography and have warped approaches to conventional relationships is a problem, but how much of a problem is it due to the internet? My generation (approaching 30) were among the first to have always on, reasonably high speed internet and yes that did mean easy access to pornography but despite that the majority of us are in long term relationships.
I think there's a lot to be made of how the internet has impacted modern society, but it doesn't exist in a single point of impact. There's also a dozen other factors that have to be taken into account, ranging from parents being less available due to increased workloads to an education system that's not encouraging people to want to learn.
My impression is that this generation has historical low levels of involvement in long term relationships and family formation
(not arguing that causality is internet porn ---> people don't get married, but it's an interesting data point)
There's a big melting pot of changes in our society, and I do think the internet has played a part as has changing opinions on religion, finance and wealth and so on.
Let us not forget the 7 deadly sins: Lust, Gluttony, Greed, Sloth, Wrath, Envy, Pride.
Teenagers simply aren't equipped to deal with these issues like adults are, hell even some adults struggle.
I think the main problem with the web is that it makes you lose your right to be forgotten. Think of those kids who post stupid videos of themselves on youtube that go viral. It won't go away, people will be able to find that 10, 20 years from now in New York, Paris or Tokyo.
I am terrified we're going to have a generation of kids who have no concept of private. Who've never been allowed to speak or be curious about anything their parents wouldn't approve of. Who are used to having to explain conversations and reading to people who were never supposed to be part of them. Parental Thought Police are orders of magnitude more terrifying than state Thought Police.
Can you imagine an adult who has never had a private experience as a child? Maybe to a collectivist culture, that isn't so scary, but to me it's dystopian.
And seriously, your parents aren't the NSA. Of course they should do what you are doing and of course you will do what you can so that they don't find out. It doesn't mean having a GPS tracker on you at all times.
I stand by my original point: the internet can be a very dangerous place filled with strangers, it's irresponsible to let your kids browse it unsupervised.
[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wSF82AwSDiUYes I spend a lot of time on the net: unlike the TV which consumed thousands of passive, scripted hours in my youth, the net is interactive, the outcome within my control. For most of my life, the many things I couldn't learn more about for lack of time or helpful resources were out of reach; the amplification is awesome. For most of my life, I had to imagine being connected with communities of shared interests, never imagining having the focussing luxury of needing to choose from among them.
Those changes in my life are all positives. So while teens are doing teenish things with this tech, they are learning - just as we adults are. And when they become parents, they'll know from experience (just as in the middle ages and in the 1800s and 1950s) the impact of these new things.
The social impact of emergent technologies has always been unpredictable. Luckily humans adapt. And so far, ever since the first piece of flint changed lives, we've muddled on somehow. Not that worry-warting is worthless; reflection is in fact the mother of adaptation.
Tales of young women giving themselves to multiple men is a common trope in hysterical portrayals of social ills. If one would like an example of what these tropes look like, 'Reefer Madness' is on netflix. This article almost reads like a paid endorsement of david camerons internet filter. It is a outrageous story about internet porn, men who dare anonymity, and youth corrupting youth designed to generate panic in the minds of ordinary men.
I have no idea what the situation is in the UK, but I know I've never been invited to any sex parties. Nor have I ever heard of such a thing happening in my area. This might be because such sex parties don't exist, or because men who obviously wouldn't participate aren't invited.
But then, who can argue with such wonderful anecdotes?
> Kidron, who carries lightly the title Baroness for her pioneering work not just in making such films as the BBC's Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit but in spreading the narrative wonder of great movies to schoolkids across the country through her FilmClub, says that many of her friends have said the same thing
where would you except the "Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit" link to lead? Maybe another Guardian article about the film? Wikipedia? IMDB? Homepage of the film? Trailer? I for one would not have excepted a credible paper like Guardian link to a crappy and most likely illegimate rip of the film. That's barely above linking directly to The PirateBay.
The ship of consequences sailed a long time ago on this one and it's not clear where it's headed.
- uncontrolled internet access, where other people's kids have access to a lot of awful stuff (not just porn but "shock" videos; goatse and worse)
- State- or business- controlled internet access, where someone else gets to control what you see, potentially eliminating access to inconvenient stories like Snowden.
We could really do with a "third way", but it needs someone to imagine what it could be, how it could work, and how it avoids the usual attempts to ruin it for everyone.
I immediately started noticing girls more and being more outgoing in life. I know this is anecdotal evidence, but I can't help but feel like it is unnatural to masturbate so often.
I think those chemicals in our body help us function and relate during crucial years and that such easy access to internet pornography is upsetting some balance.
"One of the motivators for me making the film was that a friend of my daughter came round to talk to me about a boy she had her eye on and he said she could be his girlfriend if she gave him a blowjob."
How can any rational person believe this is different from 40 years ago? You don't think teenage guys were asking for blowjobs in the 70s?!
The sexual pseudo-revolution changed our society's norms forever, well before the internet, and modern ADULT culture keeps them alive in ways that affect young people. Really, adults should be looking at themselves as the reason for why kids act the way they do.
But what adult would possibly blame themselves for what they can blame on the internet?
"Most of the responsibility has to lie, however, she thinks, with the corporations."
And telephone companies should be held accountable if someone calls you bad words on the phone. Look, there is a certain amount of personal responsibility that parents and our society as a whole have to take on, because no amount of litigiousness will stop people from behaving badly. Social change requires social change.