I was watching Loose Women the other morning... Wait! Don't go!
Let me explain, I live with four women and when I got in from a lecture they were desperately trying to procrastinate with the help of cackling middle-aged women, and failing.
So as I made myself some lunch I overheard the statement - 'I just can't relax when I know my child is two clicks away from indecent material!' - This promptly threw me into a rant of a proportion that shocked my flat-mates out of their Facebook induced trance and into a world of indignant shock.
That's a load of rubbish, they looked at me with confusion; they hadn't been paying attention to the TV at all, it was there for background noise. Which reminds me, four laptops, four smartphones, and the television on! What is wrong with people?! But that is a rant for another time.
Back to the meat of my sandwich, the saucy interior of a point, wrapped delicately in the pastry of argument...
That is to say the matter of...
A Couple Clicks to Catastrophe - The Story of a Child and the Internet
The new blockbuster that brings War Games into the 21st Century, the terrible tale of a child losing his life to the dangers of the internet, finding satisfaction in clicking endlessly past pointless and silly blog posts...
OK, no more digression. I initially ridiculed the not-so-tight females simply because I didn't believe them. Lid up, lights on, my laptop burst into power and I set off! From Google I hit 'I'm Feeling Lucky' and... went straight to Google's Doodles, despite my best efforts I couldn't actually get Google to search anything without typing it in, odd that.
Then I went for my 'Most Visited' tabs, a useful feature Chrome includes in order to exponentially reduce productivity and further encourage dependance on procrastination; a government conspiracy to keep us docile and in our homes, killing braincells with every ridiculous blogged word. The screenplay for A Couple Clicks is gaining depth.
From the 'Most Visited' tab is was very easy, primarily because I had ignored videos, in my ignorant sense of supremacy I'd ignored YouTube. After all, everyone knows the Small World Phenomenon, even if it is through a phone network's advert (I'm looking at you, Kevin Bacon), and a certain portion of the internet has applied it to YouTube; if they introduced a 'I'm Feeling Lucky' button it would probably induce the apocalypse, but as it stands you have to do it yourself often resulting in a severe dismay for the future of humanity, or at least yourself. Anybody who has prayed at the altar of YouTube for deliverance from boredom has soon found themselves swimming in deep, confused waters of Tattooing Eyeballs!? What fresh hell is this?! And other such insanity.
However, when I started this post I was primarily focussed upon a child's innocence being destroyed by the internet and I return with magnificent vigour to this point. Of course the internet makes it easy to find unsavoury items but if I have kids, I fully expect them to understand technology far better than me. Even as someone who has grown up with computers I couldn't type a word of useful code whereas eleven year-olds can already scam other eleven year-olds out of their Runescape profiles. Granted he didn't cover his tracks very well, but his parents did give him an iPhone, at eleven! Apples falling, trees and all that. In my day, a mobile hung over your cot!
Never mind, I'm not old enough or grumpy enough... yet.
I will be sorely disappointed if my child is flummoxed by BBC IPlayer asking if he is over 16, or the settings for internet security being a whole four clicks away, or even the Google solution for over-riding parental-guidance being a matter of keyboard taps away. Kids find out an awful lot on their own, after all it was an encyclopaedia we had in the house that gave me my first look at boobs and now we have this! (So very suitable for work... well, not really.)
The only risk is that they experience all these magnificent things too quickly and their head explodes. Maybe.
OK, perhaps this has all turned out a little more like a Motorway Stop massacre of a pastry but I had a good procrastinatory morning. And the point still stands, children are even more likely to find what's been hidden when they know more about the technology than we do. Don't be disappointed you never expected this to be a serious discussion, did you? Oh, sorry.
