A week or so ago I was watching television — Shocking, I know. These days, having Tivo, I skip right through the majority of commercials so I must’ve been watching something live. In any case, one of those “The More You Know” style public service announcements came on.
This one was unusual because it featured a girl, probably fifteen or sixteen, talking about meeting a guy over the internet. It then cut to the man, a generous estimate of twenty-five or so (sorry, talking about something I saw once so many days ago breeds ambiguity). Of course the attitude the man was expressing was, “It was so easy, I just pretended to empathize with her and she learned to trust me.” There were several more short cuts between the two monologues, meaning to show the dichotomy between the innocent manipulated girl and the conniving man. The screen goes black and has white text with a voice over: “Internet predators know what they’re doing. Don’t reveal your identity online.”
The whole thing strikes me as fairly ridiculous and mostly self-defeating — When I started using the internet, social customs were significantly different from how they are today. In those days having pictures of yourself was the exception, not the rule. Sharing your real name or any identifying information about yourself was unusual and a significant event. Since that time there’s been a sea change with the advent of cheap digital cameras, the rise of blogs, and networking sites like MySpace.
Old fogey that I am, my reluctance to engage in the now-common practice of putting every detail of your life online tends to be reacted to with incredulousness and suspicion. It also helps that I have that somewhat typical libertarian-style distrust of the government or anyone else who would want to pry into my personal affairs — I have a bit of concern about keeping a blog, but then again I’ve managed to stay under the radar of Google as far as I can tell until now. Having lots of identities and lots of people sharing your identities is reassuring from a privacy standpoint. Sometimes I post as Steven Den Beste, Shamus Young, or Jeff Goldstein, depending on the telluric currents. I am actually most commonly known as the Comte St. Germain — At least, I used to be known as that before I became one of the invisible masters.
The irony is that, in a social sense, the more people are reluctant to share personal information the easier it is for “internet predators” to pass without note. Not that I think [my recollection of] the public-service announcement’s advice is unsound, we certainly could do with a bit more judiciousness in sharing life details online. But ultimately a world of open doors is a much better environment, socially, than a world of closed doors.
A second layer of irony that I see in all of this is the attribution of cynical motivations towards the “internet predator.” Not that I particularly care about the image of such “predators” but it seems like there’s a degree of psychological projection going on here. The self-appointed Crusaders for Justice making such ads themselves are the cynics, and thus they assign their own cynical motivations to others. Maybe I’m being too optimistic about the intelligence of other human beings, but I find it exceedingly unlikely that it’s possible to be so wholly manipulated by a person, even at twelve or thirteen, that you’d be willing to go and meet them without precaution. In order to prevent cognitive dissonance the issue cannot be presented as it undoubtedly is but must be shown as some cynic preying upon some naive young idealist. Naturally it’s the duty of the more mature person to be … more mature. But what word is this, duty? A strange thing to modern ears, to have a duty to society’s mores when love transcends all restrictions society would seek to place on it!
A related story on MySpace that I found a day or two afterwards: Can anyone honestly believe this will work? I think something like this will just go to show how often the supposed victims are complicit in attracting the attention of unsavory types. It’s shocking I know, but shouldn’t we attempt to teach kids how to be sensible instead of endlessly trying to coddle them? (Particularly from threats that are mostly just fabrications of a media hype machine.)
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