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Perils of the online playground
Posted by: trraju on Oct 06, 2003 - 08:00 PM
Microsoft
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by Neil Barrett,
In the light of Microsoft's decision to protect children by closing down the MSN Communities, some recently published statistics make interesting reading. The UK, it seems, leads the rest of Europe in terms of children having routine access to the internet. There are some 4.5 million children under 12 accessing the internet on a regular basis - helped, no doubt, by the fact that more than half of UK families have internet access at home.
Nearly 10 years ago I wrote of the "Cybernation", a society which would emerge almost wholly committed to the online world and with only the most peripheral association with the geography, the politics and the economics of the real world. I felt then, and feel now, that it is the children who will make that leap to this new world - in much the same way that children are the generators of new creole languages from the pidgins of their parents; and are the creators of new trends, fads and fashions. The children are the future, in this very real sense.
Children, of course, like to play; what is to us the engine of commerce has always been to them simply a large and interesting toy. When the telegraph took off in the mid-19th century, the children employed by the companies to deliver messages and to run errands were the first to begin experimenting with the network, playing pranks on one another and games across the wires.
As the American telephone network was computerised in the 1960s, it was the children who discovered how to manipulate the control signals to "surf" the available connections. A blind mathematics student called Joseph Engrassia, gifted with perfect pitch, was reputedly the first to appreciate the importance of the famous 2600Hz tone. Until the criminal element were attracted following the publicity surrounding a 1972 Esquire magazine article, the telephone network was simply a playground - people explored, they played tag and they revelled in their freedom. Engrassia and his friends were blind; the telephone network became their world.
Computer hacking began in much the same way, fuelled by a child's appetite to explore and to understand. Kevin Mitnick and his friends were barely teenagers when they began to discover how accessible and exciting the interconnected world of Unix and VAX/VMS computers on the Arpanet and telephone network was. The author of the famous Hacker Manifesto, Lloyd Blankenship, argues that he and his friends were just kids who committed "crimes of curiosity".
In those early days the only way that these children were able to access that playground was by "climbing over the wall". For modern children, the playground gate is wide open and they are welcome to come and play - and they play by their millions.
Closing at least some of that playground, as Microsoft plans to do, because it is dangerous does not therefore address the issue. Kids will still want to play; and the danger will still be there. It might be better to replace that dangerous playground with a safe one rather than simply close it down altogether.
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