Pornography on the Internet
By Richard Thieme

The dark side of the Internet is capturing our imagination. Stories about online pornography, "internet addiction" and virtual romance are increasing.

We love to read this stuff. We love to eat our cake and beat up the baker at the same time. Under the cover of exposing and critiquing the subject, the media are really selling it. There are thousands of religious web sites, but we seldom see features about them on the nightly news.

Let's put all this in perspective.

The objections raised against the Internet were raised by Plato against writing. Similar concerns were voiced when the printing press was invented.

Every time there is a transformation of the technology of the Word, human nature flows into the new forms created by that technology -- "dirty jokes" were created by speech, pornographic books by writing and printing.

Technologies of the Word are mirrors of our hive mind. When we look into the Net, as when we read books, we see ourselves.

I am not minimizing child pornography on the Net as a threat. But laws already exist to fight it, and parents already have software tools to block access to sites they don't want children to reach.

The real long-term threat of the Internet is to exacerbate the growth of an underclass filled with hopelessness.

Realistic hope for the future keeps us productive and pushes extreme solutions to our problems -- from riots to revolution -- to the back burner. Destroy that hope in a critical mass of people and the pot boils over.

The power of the Internet derives from its connections, the links that make it a web. Information that is linked AND ACCESSIBLE magnifies our power.

The current turmoil as educational and corporate structures are reinvented derives from that fact above all else.

Books created a culture of desks, reading and writing, even adolescence as a period for learning how to manipulate symbols. Students needed to be in one place for a long time.

In schools, the best teachers fight to wire schools and buy computers. But computers are not books. Books are inexpensive and portable. Computers are not. We can not purchase a computer for each student. Besides, the distribution of knowledge through networked computers eliminates the need for centralized onsite education just as it has reduced the need for onsite workers. Virtual schools are as inevitable as virtual workers and the virtual office.

The real threat of the Internet is a widening gulf between people who are excited because they can imagine themselves successful in the wired world and those who are angry because they can not.

Thomas Jefferson believed that free libraries would give the common man knowledge previously reserved for an aristocracy. His vision was the stuff of political genius. Access to information is the backbone of democracy and capitalism.

Educators who partner with businesses, assisted by local government, can create by trial and error the structures of continuous learning from pre-school to retirement that enable us to be effective under these conditions. As those structures evolve, schools will be part of the educational process but in their current form they will never again be all of it.

It may be fun to attack Playboy Online, but building cross-disciplinary alliances among educators, businesses, and government to expand access to information and teach people how to use it will have more long-term impact.

1996

BACK