I love google. I love it much more than I love yahoo. Google gives me anything I want in a clear format-- it's simple and straight forward. I also love google images because if I want to see something, it's so easy to see it.
Yesterday, I was talking to the girl I babysat and we started talking about the pre-teen obsession "High School Musical" staring Zach Effron and Venessa Hudgens. In recent news, Hudgens as been in the limelight for some not so becoming pictures of herself... digital pictures that she took of herself in the nude. Okay so whatever, that's fine... an 18 year old girl wanted to send her boyfriend (co-star Zach Effron) some "sexy" pics. Well, the issue is the 9 year old girl I babysit was able to check out the pics when she simply googled them! And it's pretty easy to do, there are no pop-ups or anything asking the Internet surfer for proof of age, etc.
Okay... so, here is a 9 year old googling nude images out of curiosity. These days it's easy to take advantage of the Internet putting everything at your fingertips in that amazing kind of way. But what about when the Internet brings too much to the finger tips of little ones?
I'm beginning to think the Internet is the media and visa versa, they cannot exist without one another. So what seems to be happening is, a pre-teen is standing in line at the grocery store and sees an US Weekly or People with a headline about this star, they've been watching over and over again, getting naked for the camera. And all this pre-teen has to do is go home and google it? Or, when the news was breaking, turn on the TV at the right time or watch a news program with Mom and Pops? What is this media/Internet world coming too? I remember when the Internet first got big and the only real way online was AOL and there were all these precautions on how to protect the little ones... but today, the rules have changed. Can we censor google? Or is the Internet becoming more and more difficult to censor? Or, simply is this the so-called beauty of the Internet?
Censorship is awful for adults, for journalists, for the democracy of America however I'm thinking censorship okay-- ethically sound-- for the ones that aren't mature yet. There needs to be a way to protect the children of tomorrow when they have access to everything at their finger tips. In some cases, too much information for the wee ones isn't good. Are little girls, following Hudgen's path going to start taking pics of themselves? I know that this brings up the non-ethics/ stupidity of the Disney star, who serves as a role model for lots of little ones, but this information would just be hear-say if the images couldn't simply be googled. I mean sure, confirm the story is true, but seriously, do we--young and old-- need to see them?
Maybe the kids of tomorrow are bound to learn that this world isn't peachy and maybe they're going to learn it via the Internet and new-media. But maybe I'm just shocked because, as my cab driver suggested last night, I'm seeing the world through rose colored glasses.
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I'm okay -- I'm more than okay -- with children (slippery definition) -- having their access to certain media censored. The V-chip is apparently a joke because so few parents use it, but the concept of parents keeping kids from seeing and hearing certain things by using certain filters is fine with me. Maybe we need old-fashioned national campaigns to alert parents to the on-computer, on-tv tech that allows them to restrict. But many won't, of course. And "responsible" parents have kids who have friends whose parents aren't "responsible." Ah, a puzzler. At the moment, I fear censorship more than I fear a few kids seeing naked pictures. But it can get a lot more complicated than that, obviously.
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