The Year of the Mediaphobe page 2
America Online, more and more aping the behavior of the traditional media organizations it is trying to supplant, proudly announced new blocking software of its own. The company "wants to empower parents with the appropriate tools to restrict access to various parts of AOL and the Internet for their children," said a company official.The Mediaphobe is undoubtedly happy to hear the good news -- the media and the government are responding to his fears. Increasingly flummoxed by all the choices facing his offspring, he wants to ban things more and more these days. He feels the ground shifting, his fixed points collapsing. The Mediaphobe frequently couches his panic in terms of dangers to others, particularly children. But he's really afraid for himself, of what he doesn't know and is too lazy to learn, of the new and scary world on the other side of the screen.
Mediaphobia has, in fact, become one of the country's few unifying movements, a common cause that brings together everyone from Jesse Helms to Tipper Gore, from conservative values crusaders to educators to feminists to liberal baby-boomer parents. People who agree on little else agree that the media is taking us to hell in an electronic handbasket. And invariably the demons that most arouse their ire are pornography and violent imagery.
Pornography is the media's despised bastard child. Wherever media exist, pornography tags along, a far more resilient and influential force than the poobahs of the press would ever openly acknowledge. It morphs into whatever form media take. It is widely believed to be the killer app that drove the VCR boom of the '80s. It sells millions of magazines and books. It is a potent force behind the growth of the Net.
Pornography is immutable. Like a river coursing towards the sea, it always finds a way around, over or through all the obstacles desperately thrown up to stop it. It dates as far back as recorded history. The Getty Museum in Los Angeles offers a standing exhibit of exquisitive clay vases dating from the 3rd or 4th Century B.C. in Athens, the height of classical civilization. Painted on the vases are graphic depictions of homosexual and heterosexual intercourse, in almost every conceivable position.
Mediaphobia has, in fact, become one of the country's few unifying movements, a common cause that brings together everyone from Jesse Helms to Tipper Gore, from conservative values crusaders to educators to feminists to liberal baby-boomer parents.
As Walter Kendrick observed in "The Secret Museum: Pornography in Modern Culture," erotica was once controlled by affluent men -- the only people who could afford it or were literate enough to read it. But technology, that great democratizing force, has made pornography available to the masses. Baby-boomer parents and members of Congress may be the last people in America to grasp the notion that new media, for better or worse, are uncensorable. Children cannot be barricaded or encased in protective social bubbles. Computers, modems, VCR's, faxes, cellular technology, 900 numbers, 24-hour cable channels and hundreds of magazines make it as impossible to "protect" children from graphic representations of the real world as it is for the judicial system to find jurors who are totally ignorant of cases like that of O.J. Simpson.
It makes sense that exposure to pornography can exacerbate the problems of some disturbed or dysfunctional people. But it is far from clear that images of sodomy or other kinds of sexual behavior are in themselves harmful to children. Furthermore, the panic over electronic seduction of minors is wildly overblown. Time magazine quoted the executive director of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children as saying there have been "10 or 12" cases in the past year of children "being seduced or lured online into situations where they are victimized." This is horrible for the victims but, if accurate, it's a tiny number -- evidence not of the dangers of the Net but of its relative safety.
Next page: Blocking the wrong things
