Just a bit of a disclaimer at the start of this post. I have had a lousy day trying to rebuild my wife’s media machine and having nothing but problems doing it - so if I seem a tad crusty in my tone - tough - I am and the subject matter just begs a crusty attitude.

One of the subjects that always gets me going when the discussion comes to the Internet and the abuses piled on it is the whining and crying by the adults about the dangers it is putting their children in and why isn’t the government doing anything about it. This attitude was illustrated in a post today by Duncan Riley on TechCrunch in his relating a new survey that found that people think the Internet is more dangerous than school violence or sexually transmitted diseases

The survey found that Internet safety is a relatively new health concern amongst parents. Women were more likely to rate it as a big problem; 32% of women report Internet safety as a big problem compared with only 21% of men. Internet safety had no differences in proportion of concern by education status, income level or marital status.

Well lets set one thing straight right off the bat. The Internet is not dangerous, it doesn’t cause the mental and physical anguish that bullies do and nor will it give you an STD. The Internet is one’s and zero’s .. it is a benign pathway for the sharing of information. It does not instigate pedophilia, rape, theft or any such other type of crime.

People rape people, people molest children and people steal from other people and they have for as long as man has walked on two legs and grunted “UGG” at one another. The only things that has changed between then and now is that we have learned to stick a knife in the other persons back while smiling and pirate a movie all at the same time.

The short end of this is that people will use whatever tools are available to abuse others, to steal from others. After all pedophiles have been around since before the Romans and Greeks and let’s not go into the old Et Tu, Brute. To blame the one’s and zero’s of the Internet is nothing less than abrogating our responsibility as individuals and members of society.

It is so much easier to blame the nameless ether of the web for all our woes and foibles than it is to accept the fact that we are the one’s responsible. It’s easier to sit the kid in front of a monitor than to monitor them yourselves. How many times have you heard a parent says they had no idea what their kid was doing on the computer. Guess what - if you don’t know what they are doing then you are the one’s to blame - you are the first line of defense - not the nanny state.

You can’t even blame the providers because they are doing just what is expected of a business out to make a buck - providing a service. It is up to you and your wallet as to whether you enable them to pay their bills and buy their toys. It’s up to you not to blindly accept everything put before you without checking into it.

But no it’s easier to pass the buck to the politicians and the bureaucrats than it is to step up to the plate and get involved on a personal level. Instead of setting boundaries yourself you let the government do it for you and then when it isn’t done to your liking the ranting begins.

You can rant all you want but if you really want to know who is to blame for the misuses of the Internet then look in the mirror not the monitor.

Conversation Tags: Internet, responsibility, evil, society