The Frontier Works Both Ways

Years ago, the internet was touted as bringing information to your fingertips. Things that once required a drive to the library, or to the library in another city, would be available in your home. This was the dawning of the new age of information access and exchange.

Of course now the ease of gathering information includes instant access on portable devices such as cellphones and pdas. With this ease of information transfer, the world is at our fingertips even without wires.

However, not everyone understands (or understood at the time of this dawning) that access to information and resources is not limited to good or positive information and resources. There is no demographic more effected by this realization than parents.

The internet does not discern between Financial Research and Child Pornography. To your computer and the servers/routers on the internet, all of this information is simply collections of data, ultimately series or ones and zeros to be sent or received.

This means that you and your child can read the news as easily as you can watch humans have sex with animals. To further complicate the matter, it's not necessarily reasonable for "the internet" to manage the content. What this means to us; the users, the families, and the parents, is that by having internet access in our homes, work, and schools brings us one click away from allowing ANY content in.

While this is a bonus for many, this is a problem for parents. Parents are responsible for the nurturing of their children. Leaving a child alone with access to anything on the internet, is like dropping them off with a body guard in an alley in bangkok where the body guard is only allowed to prevent physical attack.

In the short run, a child on the internet will get be physically attacked even though there are cases where online activity has led to abduction and abuse. However, the psychological effects are similar to direct exposure to the back streets of bangkok. They are able to passively experience things that negatively effect their psychological growth.

Unfortunately, the awareness of their surroundings and allowable limitations often assists in children accessing dangerous information and keeping it a secret. This is where many parents are not able to intervene until the damage has been done. It could be an addiction to pornography, or it could be a physical relation with an adult, but the dangers are real. In some cases, children simply disappear as they are abducted after meeting a stranger.

The dangers are significantly different that previous generations have had to deal with. We're forced to balance the need for information, the necessity to be technologically adept, with the need to limit dangerous information and contact. In short, we are bringing Bangkok into our backyards and must find methods of keeping safe at the same time.