Wednesday, July 16, 2008

"What you don't know could hurt you"

So proclaimed a headline in a religious community newsletter the other day. The article came about 10 years too late to do me any good, but I now know of the dangers lurking on the Internet.

As a responsible blogger, it behooves me to pass these on before you too while away too many hours on the best timesuck since Tetris.

I originally intended to do that clever-bloggy-post-excerpts-and-add-witty-commentary thing, but, um, the wit's not with me tonight. And the article writes its own punchlines; the writer, I'm guessing, actually went online all of maybe one time. I leave all grammatical idiosyncrasies intact, and no, in case you are wondering, it's not written by children or adolescents.

One of the most attractive reasons for the popularity of these electronic landmines is that the person who is using them can remain totally anonymous. You have no real idea who is on the other side of the screen. It could be a child molester or a 5 year old.

and

The other totally dangerous place [besides chat rooms] is YouTube. This is a website where people can post what ever video they made or find so other people can view. I hate it. I don't hate the idea and the application but I hate the way it is done. For example, Go search for a topic and you will get few interesting videos to watch. Click on one and watch it, and when you are don the application pops up few "similar" videos. So you watch few more. Every time you click on one it gives you more. It is like a drug addict, "Just One More, Pleeeease". What is also bad about it is you have no idea what comes up next. You could start with few cute videosabout animals and end up with a raunchy and totally inappropriate sexually filled video. And this is available for EVERYONE including children without any supervision or the least amount of decency what so ever.
Heh. Love the last line. Children without supervision and decency definitely shouldn't ever be introduced to such things. Of course, that's hardly the responsiblity of Youtube or chatroom moderators, now, is it?

This is all, of course, brought to you by the same folks who are experts on the evils of Harry Potter without ever having touched the books. They're completely out of touch with the very people they should be reaching, if the dangers of the books or the Internet are as drastic as they make them out to be, and no number of "totally"s in an essay like that is going to make the least bit of difference.

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