I rarely tell the story of how during my teenage years in Fleetwood (then accurately described as the only cemetery with tram-lines running through it) I invented sexting. But I will share it with you if you promise not to tell my Mum.
I sneaked the family Kodak out of the cupboard and took a series of pictures of my private parts to finish off the roll of film, using a make-shift tripod (for the camera) and a timer. Using all my pocket-money, I then slipped down to the local chemists to get the film developed and distributed the pictures among my school-mates at Fleetwood Grammar. What larks!
I rarely tell the story because it is, in more than one sense, complete bollocks. Of course, I could no more do that than roll a tape-deck into the local record store’s listening booth, perhaps disguised as a pantomime horse, and copy all of the Beatles’ songs. The technology that existed meant that there was no easy way to do such things. People would have noticed. My father bristled when others so much as touched the camera and using up film was a capital offence, the local chemist was the father of a friend and teachers would have pounced on such behaviour with relish.
Times and technology have changed. While I recall a strong urge to access what we then thought of as porn pictures (woman showing lots of cleavage), which would now be regarded as too tame for the Daily Mail web site, and that I was prepared to spend a great deal of time and effort in doing so, I have little or no understanding of what young people today face. My inability to understand seems to me to be mirrored by, well, almost everyone. The row over what have come, inaccurately, to be described as the Claire Perry proposals (they were actually proposals from a cross-party Parliamentary inquiry) has just added to my confusion.
Many experts on the Internet and its regulation whose views I greatly respect seem to have indulged in a wilful refusal to acknowledge a problem – a problem which has been greatly overstated but which does not thereby disappear. That refusal and some questionable arguments to oppose any action are my focus, on the basis that the Daily Mail and Conservative Home does not read this blog and so there is little point in focusing on the over-simplifications from that end of the argument (which are many).
I agree wholeheartedly that none of the proposed filtering solutions that I have heard mentioned will work – if we define a working solution as something that will provide an impenetrable barrier between teens (and younger children) and porn. But that’s a facile response – making access more difficult is the realistic aim and the associated increase in the threat of being embarrassed.
I agree too that parents should take responsibility. But that’s a facile response too because (a) so should we all (including ISPs), (b) children fool parents all the time (it is an important life-skill) and (c) there are some awful parents out there who don’t, won’t or even can’t take responsibility.
And defining ‘porn’ or ‘harmful porn’ will be tricky if not impossible, but we have working definitions for other media (which often fail but mainly work). The hypocrisy arguments that are associated at times with the difficulties over the definition are really the most facile of all. (There is though a major cost issue here that I see no sign of being properly addressed, let alone resolved.)
{i}Of course{/i}, any such restriction involves a reduction in Internet freedom; the question is whether it is a justifiable restriction. The argument that I have seen advanced that filtering offers a threat to political freedom seems to run counter to the ‘easily avoided’ argument, unless we assume that the desire for political freedom is as nothing compared to the drive to access porn. (That assumption may hold good for younger teenagers but it is surely a temporary phenomenon despite low election turn-outs.)
It is also true that the proposed solutions would impose an obligation on ISPs and search engines. The major ISPs seem only too willing to shoulder that burden (nothing could make me more suspicious) while search engines (OK, I mean Google) are said to be opposed to going further than their safe search already does. I have little patience with the suggestion that a company with Google’s financial and intellectual resources will be incapable of doing anything more to help.
All-in-all, I believe that there is a problem, that we don’t fully understand it and that we genuinely need some further light cast on it. That {i}should{/i} be what consultations are for.
But my real argument for engaging fully and constructively in the Government’s proposed consultation on this issue is that this is an unstoppable force. Not only is it a populist, low-cost issue and thus appealing to any Government, we have a Brussels-based {consultation in the pipe-line too: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-17952259}. It is just not going away and the best way forward must be to make the regulation effective only insofar as necessary to protect children and not allow the creation of a wider Internet censorship regime that could indeed be an irritant. That requires the engagement of those who really do understand the Internet and the limits of regulation. Don’t leave it to the blow-hards to create a ‘solution’ that offends.
