http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/8551122.stm

and i am with helen @13 this is not the tools (telephone, smoke signals) fault…but rather our current inability to de-mystify it ..without the MSM sensationalism on one hand (its inherently evil and rots the brain) or www2 evangelism on the other (it’s a force for open content and better democracy).

“(b) The direction of causation is the wrong way round. It’s not that the internet encourages people to do dumb and wrong things. It’s that people do dumb and wrong things, and they do them on the internet too.”

There’s a problem here in relation to adolescent developmental psychology which is that adolescent males in particular are very influenced by what they see. They are much less relational than females in terms of learned behaviour and much more experimental so that witnessing someone do something opens the portal to reproduction of that act. This is at the core of the problem in relation to adolescent access to internet pornography. Young males, presumably females as well, are learning about a range of possible sexual practices through visual representations on the tubes. Some of these practices are, to say the least, “extreme”.

Please note: I’m not talking about access to images involving minors and Pr0n but images widely available at the click of a mouse that represent adults and young men and women doin’ a very strange range of things.

It is exactly the availability and ubiquity of this material that has fuelled Hamilton’s expressed reservations and Conroy’s damn filter. We shouldn’t avoid the fact that there appears to be significant support for the filter based on a widespread notion that developing adolescents and younger people ought not to be exposed to that material. Yes, I know that net-nanny software on the home computer is the solution, but not all parents are that responsible and it is easy enough for teenage kids to utilise unguarded computers in mates’ houses to have a look.

At core the point is that for adolescent males visual representations of sex are powerful educators of desire. The problem is that the realm in which their desire is being educated is out of anyone’s social control. It was not ever thus. So far the broad left has not responded adequately to this issue and consequently in failing to do so we have ceded political and moral authority to the moral straighteners at some potential cost to the right to freedom of communication.

I’m as much worried by representations of violence and the way they impact young men as by perverse sexualised images. Youtube is a major offender here: they run anything and searching it for the topics “street fights” and “school fights” will deliver hundreds if not thousands of hits of real and frequently sickening violence. There has already been one terribly tragic consequence from exposure to this material. About 18 months ago in the inner west of Sydney two 14 year old males wanted to experiment with fighting. Real fighting. They went to a park after school and agreed to attack and defend but neither had any self defence experience. They were best friends. They had no grievance with each other. They wanted to fight to see what it was like as they had been watching Y-T vids and after school fighting was getting a lot of airplay at the time. Tragically one of the kids had a clotting disorder and suffered a cerebral haemorrhage after taking a hit from his mate. He died. Many lives broken and shattered from a single misapprehension which is that fighting is groovy and masculinising. Just a couple of skinny little kids reproducing what they’d seen on the tubes.

It’d be terrific if the owners of the tubes policed their own content with some level of sophisticated knowledge about developmental psychology but they haven’t so far and I’m not expecting it soon. In the meantime Conroy is on a march.