IP: Blame Society, Not the Net, for the Evils Lurking Online

[Dave Farber <farber () cis upenn edu>]

Since many IP readers do not easily surf off to URLs I have attached the
contents of the following pointer. My copyright sensitivities suggest that
since there is no password , registration etc on the url destination this
is not a bad thing :-)


Dave






http://wp1.washingtonpost.com/cgi-bin/displaySearch?WPlate+36234+%28john%26s
 


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Blame Society, Not the Net, for the Evils Lurking Online
By John Schwartz  
Washington Post Staff Writer  
Monday, November 18 1996; Page F19
 The Washington Post 






"Is the Net a dangerous place?" asked Diane Rehm, with trademark earnestness.


She raised the question last week on her nationally syndicated radio
program, but she isn't the only one asking. Commentators have been taking a
harsh look at the Internet lately and always seem to come away with "deep
concerns" about "troubling implications for society."


Welcome to the latest chapter of the great Net scare, today's Big Threat.
Along with the usual stories about online hatemongers, hackers and lechers
come these recent stories:


A front-page piece in the New York Times last week warned that college
students are getting sucked into endless hours of online activity, forgoing
studies and becoming isolated.


An Associated Press story trumpeted the news that police had arrested a man
for going online to find someone to rape his wife.


And of course there's the bizarre story of Sharon Lopatka, the Carroll
County, Md., torture fetishist who, via the Internet, sought a man to kill
her and then went all the way to Lenoir, N.C., to meet him. "I don't know
about this Internet," mused the North Carolina prosecutor pursuing the
case. "I think I'm not letting my kids anywhere near it for a while."


The Net has become the all-purpose scary place, good for a quick headline
or government initiative. When Internet pioneer Vinton Cerf dropped by The
Post for a lunch earlier this month, he ridiculed the logic that when bad
things happen via the Net, it's somehow the Net's fault -- and then sober
questions are inevitably asked about how to control this new menace. "You
know you can get in your car and kill people?" he said with mock
astonishment. "Maybe we should ban cars."


I use the Net to find information and to meet people, and I find it a great
place to be, spending hours a day online. I have educated myself about it,
and avoid those neighborhoods where I know I won't feel comfortable.
Common-sensically, I don't put my children online without being there to
supervise, just as I wouldn't just drop them off at the mall for a day of
roaming.


So the idea that these various news stories all underscore some dark truth
about the dangers of the Internet mystifies me, and leads me to raise a
bunch of "as ifs." As if college students had never wasted time before. As
if people haven't long used classified ads or singles bars to find each
other, sometimes for ne\farious purposes.


People lately are willing to make the most amazing stretches of fact and
reason to blame the Net. When Pierre Salinger held a Paris press conference
to announce what turned out to be a bogus TWA Flight 800 conspiracy that
had been floating around online discussions for months, stories in the New
York Times and Chicago Tribune painted the Internet as a conduit of
unreliable information. As if Salinger couldn't do what thousands of others
who read that message had done: dismissed it as a paranoid fantasy, one
more Net urban legend like the Neiman Marcus $250 cookie recipe.


Similarly, when allegations of CIA involvement in the crack trade were
distributed via the Internet, many commentators excoriated the Net as a
place where unsubstantiated ru\mors fly -- when in fact these "rumors" had
originated in a San Jose Mercury News series that had the benefit of all
those layers of editing that the Internet supposedly lacks.


And in a weird new twist on the trend for blaming the Net for all our
problems, telephone companies such as Pacific Bell have said that
plain-vanilla Internet users -- not even the perverts -- are putting such a
strain on their networks that local phone service is imperiled.


Interestingly, the telephone companies' own Network Reliability Council has
reported no recent telephone outages have resulted from Internet usage.
Pacific Bell's complaint led Cerf to suggest that the companies actually
might be looking to boost rates from Internet users. "That's a genteel way
of saying, `You speak with forked tongue!' " he joked.


Like many Net boosters, though, Cerf wants it both ways: He wants what's
good about the Internet to be seen as revolutionary, and what's bad to be
seen as not much different from what you find in the real world.


But we all know that, in fact, the very things that make the Net a special
force for good -- such as the ability to find people of common in\terest
around the world -- give it extra punch when people want to use it to do
bad things. Our tools extend our abilities, and the abilities of bad people
as well. As one noted analyst of the modern age has observed, "The `bad'
parts of technology cannot be separated from the `good' parts."


Well, okay, the "noted analyst of the modern age" is the Unabomber. I agree
with the critique, but not with his solution. The people de\crying the Net
are using technology as a scapegoat for the fact that we haven't, as a
so\ciety, addressed these problems. Yes, it's a shame that there are
pedophiles on the Internet. But the real horror is there are pedophiles in
the real world and that pedophilia exists at all.


Let's face facts. To the extent that there's a problem out there, it's our
society that's sick -- or at least, it has spawned a number of sick and
broken people. The Internet, as the most personal medium ever developed,
reflects that. I guess cartoonist Walt Kelly said it best: "We have met the
enemy, and he is us."


Could we move on to the next Big Threat now? Please? 


John Schwartz's e-mail address is schwartj () twp com    


PLACES TO GO  


  You can read the now-famous TWA Flight 800 memo at http://members.
aol.com/tomhun8054/twa800.html; the Unabom manifesto can be found at
http://pele.ckm.ucsf.edu/marc/misc/ anarchy/fc/. Interneters discuss the
press and the Net on the newsgroup alt.internet.media-coverage.    


&copy Copyright 1996 The Washington Post Company


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