"We need to be careful about giving children access to the Internet"

[kaberett]

I was a queer teen under section 28. I say I was brought up by the Internet, and what I mean is: the Internet told me that people like me could exist, and exist happily and without judgment, at least some of the time.

And now, after that thoroughly vile FB conversation, I am going to go to Bar Wotever and watch my girlfriend sing cock rock, because I'm an adult now.

Comments

[inoru_no_hoshi]

On the one hand, some care is needed with children on the internet, because IDK about you but I used to be Exceedingly Dumb about giving out some personal info (age, sex, location, walletname, etc., etc.) because They Were Friends And Awesome People! It could've gone very badly for me - but that's the sort of concerns I think of when I think of policing children's internet forays. (I'm of two minds about porn but mostly I fall into "once they're older than 10-12, if they're interested, let them look" because goodness knows I was hardly uninterested in sex and porn at those ages!)

But on the other: the internet has been my salve and security blanket, and has no small hand in the fact that I A) am not dead, B) know and accept that I'm not straight, C) know and accept that I'm kinda unrepentantly kinky. I remain uncertain as to whether any of these would be true (for A) or known/accepted (for B and C) by the time I was 19 (or even now, at 25) without the fact that I had the internet at my fingertips since I was 12 or so. It's not a resource I would want to keep from anyone, because I have no way of knowing whose life could be saved, or made to suddenly make so much sense, because they can look around and see that maybe not everything's okay with their life, but they're not alone.

So... I think my point is that children need to be more aware of which things could be very dangerous for them to share on the internet (age, physical location, full walletname... things that could lead to predation and/or identity theft) and why it's dangerous, so we need to clearly communicate these things, but restrict access? No.