Technopanics & the Precautionary Principle

Sen. Klobuchar Stirs Up Facebook Child Safety Technopanic

by on July 15, 2010 · 5 comments

Sen. Amy Klobuchar just released a letter to Facebook demanding the site require “a prominent safety button or link on the profile pages of users under the age of 18″—akin to the so-called “panic button” app launched earlier this week by the UK’s Child Exploitation & Online Protection Centre (CEOP). She doesn’t seem to realize that this app is available to all Facebook users, not just those in the UK. But her focus on empowerment tools and education is admirable, and it’s certainly a fair question to ask what sites like Facebook and MySpace are doing in these areas.

Unfortunately, Klobuchar’s letter also engages in blatant fear-mongering:

Recent research has shown that one in four American teenagers have been victims of a cyber predator.  And when teens experience abusive behavior online, only ten percent discuss it with their parents and even fewer report the misconduct to law enforcement.  It’s clear that teenagers need to know how to respond to a cyber attack and I believe we need stronger reporting mechanisms to keep our kids safe.

Klobuchar doesn’t actually cite anything, so it’s not clear what research she’s relying on. The 25% statistic is particularly incendiary, suggesting a nationwide cyber-predation crisis—perhaps leading the public to believe 8 or 9 million teens have been lured into sexual encounters offline. Perhaps the Senator considers every cyber-bully a cyber predator—which might get to the 25% number. But there are two serious problem with that moral equivalence.

First, to equate child predation with peer bullying is to engage in a dangerous game of defining deviancy down. Predation and bullying are radically different things. The first (sexual abuse) is a clear and heinous crime that can lead to long-term psychological damage. The second might be a crime in certain circumstances, but generally not.  And it is even less likely to be a crime when it occurs among young peers, which research shows constitutes the vast majority of cases. As Adam Thierer and I noted in our Congressional testimony last year, there are legitimate concerns about cyberbullying, but it’s something best dealt with by parents and schools rather than prosecutors (like Klobuchar in her pre-Senate career).

Second, a series of official taskforces have concluded that the cyberpredator technopanic is vastly overblown. Continue reading →

SHARE: 5 comments

Google Street View/Wi-Fi Privacy Technopanic Continues but Real Cybersecurity Begins at Home

by on July 8, 2010 · 12 comments

Congressmen working on national intelligence and homeland security either don’t know how to secure their own home Wi-Fi networks (it’s easy!) or don’t understand why they should bother. If you live outside the Beltway, you might think the response to this problem would be to redouble efforts to educate everyone about the importance of personal responsibility for data security, starting with Congressmen and their staffs. But of course those who live inside the Beltway know that the solution isn’t education or self-help but… you guessed it… to excoriate Google for spying on members of Congress (and bigger government, of course)!

Consumer Watchdog (which doesn’t actually claim any consumers as members) held a press conference this morning about their latest anti-Google stunt, announced last night on their “Inside Google” blog: CWD drove by five Congressmen’s houses in the DC area last week looking for unencrypted Wi-Fi networks. At Jane Harman’s (D-CA) home, they found two unencrypted networks named “Harmanmbr” and “harmantheater” that suggest the networks are Harman’s. So they sent Harman a letter demanding that she hold hearings on Google’s collection of Wi-Fi data, charging Google with “WiSpying.” This is a classic technopanic and the most craven, cynical kind of tech politics—dressed in the “consumer” mantle.

The Wi-Fi/Street View Controversy

Rewind to mid-May, when Google voluntarily disclosed that the cars it used to build a photographic library of what’s visible from public streets for Google Maps Street View had been unintentionally collecting small amounts of information from unencrypted Wi-Fi hotspots like Harman’s. These hotspots can be accessed by anyone who might drive or walk by with a Wi-Fi device—thus potentially exposing data sent over those networks between, say, a laptop in the kitchen, and the wireless router plugged into the cable modem.

Google’s Street View allows you to virtually walk down any public street and check out the neighborhood Continue reading →

SHARE: 12 comments

Kids, Media, Commercialism & Moral Panic

by on June 7, 2010 · 0 comments

I spend a lot of time here trying to debunk media “moral panics,” “techno-panics,” or unfounded hysteria over the impact of commercialism in general on kids. To believe what some politicians and regulatory agitators have to say, today’s youth always seem at the precipice of the moral abyss.  Our misguided youth are seemingly all going straight to hell and they dragging our culture and society down with them.

Except they’re not. It’s all the same old tripe we’ve heard one generation after another.  As the late University of North Carolina journalism professor Margaret A. Blanchard once noted: “[P]arents and grandparents who lead the efforts to cleanse today’s society seem to forget that they survived alleged attacks on their morals by different media when they were children. Each generation’s adults either lose faith in the ability of their young people to do the same or they become convinced that the dangers facing the new generation are much more substantial than the ones they faced as children.” And Thomas Hine, author of The Rise and Fall of the American Teenager, argues that: “We seem to have moved, without skipping a beat, from blaming our parents for the ills of society to blaming our children. We want them to embody virtues we only rarely practice. We want them to eschew habits we’ve never managed to break.”

Anyway, I was reminded of this again today as I was finally reading through a report published last year by the U.K.’s Department for Children, Schools and Families and the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. It’s entitled “The Impact of the Commercial World on Children’s Wellbeing” and it is very much worth your attention. Several people had recommended I check it out in recent months, but I’m ashamed to say I am only now getting around to it as I prepare an amicus brief for the Supreme Court’s review of a California video game law.  But this U.K. report is not to be missed. Here are a few of the choice bits from the study: Continue reading →

SHARE: 0 comments

Excellent Slate Article on Techno-Panics & Fears of Info Overload

by on February 16, 2010 · 1 comment

Ryan Radia brought to my attention this excellent Slate piece by Vaughan Bell entitled, “Don’t Touch That Dial! A History of Media Technology Scares, from the Printing Press to Facebook.” It touches on many of the themes I’ve discussed here in my essays on techno-panics, fears about information overload, and the broader optimists v. pessimist battle throughout history regarding the impact of new technologies on culture, life and learning. “These concerns stretch back to the birth of literacy itself,” Bell rightly notes:

Worries about information overload are as old as information itself, with each generation reimagining the dangerous impacts of technology on mind and brain. From a historical perspective, what strikes home is not the evolution of these social concerns, but their similarity from one century to the next, to the point where they arrive anew with little having changed except the label.

Quite right. And Bell’s essay reminds us of this gem from the great Douglas Adams about how bad we humans are at putting technological change in perspective:

Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.

So true, and I wish I would have remembered it before I wrapped up my discussion about “adventure windows” in the review of Jaron Lanier’s new book, You Are Not a Gadget, which I published last night. As I noted in that essay:

Our willingness to try new things and experiment with new forms of culture—our “adventure window”—fades rapidly after certain key points in life, as we gradually get set in our ways. Many cultural critics and average folk alike always seem to think the best days are behind us and the current good-for-nothing generation and their new-fangled gadgets and culture are garbage.

Continue reading →

SHARE: 1 comment

A Rarity: Newspaper Argues Against Techno-panic, Cites Constitution

by on November 17, 2009 · 4 comments

Adam has done yeoman’s work for years pointing out, and arguing against, the phenomenon of techno-panic as it relates to children. That’s not the only area in which techno-panic can tighten its grip on the neck of common sense and the constitution, of course.

But here’s a delight I ran across this morning: the Los Angeles Times arguing against techno-panic despite the use of Web sites to research and case potential burglary victims (by the “bling ring,” soon to be the subject of a major motion picture).

The Times editorializes:

[T]hieves [did not] have to wait for the invention of Google maps to reconnoiter neighborhoods in search of easily accessible homes. That’s worth remembering if, as we fear, some legislator decides that a law should be passed to prevent Internet surfers from looking at houses they easily could scope out from the sidewalk. . . . . A law against photographing a home or what occurs outside it in plain sight — or disseminating the images to others — would be overreaching, not to mention unconstitutional.

What a delight—a major newspaper arguing to keep a hot issue in perspective and citing the constitution as a limit on government power! Thank you, L.A. Times.

SHARE: 4 comments

Against Techno-Panics

by on July 15, 2009 · 159 comments

I’ve just had a new article published by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) in which I make the case against “techno-panics,” which refers to public and political crusades against the use of new media or technologies by the young. The article is entitled “Parents, Kids & Policymakers in the Digital Age: Safeguarding Against ‘Techno-Panics‘” and it appears in the July 2009 Inside ALEC newsletter.  This is something I have spent a lot of time writing about here in recent years (See 1, 2, 3, 4, 5) and I finally got around to putting it altogether in a concise essay here.  I have pasted the full text below. [And I just want to send a shout-out to my friend Anne Collier of Net Family News.org, whose work on this topic has been very influential on my thinking.]

__________________________

“Parents, Kids & Policymakers in the Digital Age: Safeguarding Against ‘Techno-Panics‘”
by Adam Thierer

A cursory review of the history of media and communications technologies reveals a reoccurring cycle of “techno-panics” — public and political crusades against the use of new media or technologies by the young.  From the waltz to rock-and-roll to rap music, from movies to comic books to video games, from radio and television to the Internet and social networking websites, every new media format or technology has spawned a fresh debate about the potential negative effects they might have on kids.

Inevitably, fueled by media sensationalism and various activist groups, these social and cultural debates quickly become political debates. Indeed, each of the media technologies or outlets mentioned above was either regulated or threatened with regulation at some point in its history. And the cycle continues today. During recent sessions of Congress, countless hearings were held and bills introduced on a wide variety of media and content-related issues. These proposals dealt with broadcast television and radio programming, cable and satellite television content, video games, the Internet, social networking sites, and much more.  State policymakers, especially state Attorneys General (AGs), have also joined in such crusades on occasion.  The recent push by AGs for mandatory age verification for all social networking sites is merely the latest example.

What is perhaps most ironic about these techno-panics is how quickly yesterday’s boogeyman becomes tomorrow’s accepted medium, even as the new villains replace old ones.  For example, the children of the 1950s and 60s were told that Elvis’s hip shakes and the rock-and-roll revolution would make them all the tools of the devil. They grew up fine and became parents themselves, but then promptly began demonizing rap music and video games in the ‘80s and ‘90s.  And now those aging Pac Man-era parents are worried sick about their kids being abducted by predators lurking on MySpace and Facebook. We shouldn’t be surprised if, a decade or two from now, today’s Internet generation will be decrying the dangers of virtual reality.

Continue reading →

SHARE: 159 comments

Collier on “Why Technopanics are Bad”

by on April 23, 2009 · 9 comments

My friend Anne Collier of Net Family News, one of America’s great sages on child safety issues, has produced a terrific list of reasons “Why Technopanics are Bad.”  Technopanics and moral panics are topics I’ve spent quite a bit of time commenting on here. (See 1, 2, 3, 4.) Anne is a rare voice of sanity and sensible advice when it comes to online child safety issues and I encourage you to read all her excellent work on the subject, including her book with Larry Magid, MySpace Unraveled: A Parent’s Guide to Teen Social Networking.  Anyway, here’s Anne’s list, and I encourage you to go over to her site and contribute your thoughts and suggestions about what else to add:

Technopanics are bad because they…

  • Cause fear, which interferes with parent-child communication, which in turn puts kids at greater risk.
  • Cause schools to fear and block digital media when they need to be teaching constructive use, employing social-technology devices and teaching new media literacy and citizenship classes throughout the curriculum.
  • Turn schools into barriers rather than contributors to young people’s constructive use.
  • Increase the irrelevancy of school to active young social-technology users via the sequestering or banning of educational technology and hamstring some of the most spirited and innovative educators.
  • Distract parents, educators, policymakers from real risks – including, for example, child-pornography laws that do not cover situations where minors can simultaneously be victim and “perpetrator” and, tragically, become registered sex offenders in cases where there no criminal intent (e.g., see this).
  • Reduce the competitiveness of US education among developed countries already effectively employing educational technology and social media in schools.
  • Reduce the competitiveness of US technology and media businesses practicing good corporate citizenship where youth online safety is concerned.
  • Lead to bad legislation, which aggravates above outcomes and takes the focus off areas where good laws on the books can be made relevant to current technology use.
  • Widen the participation gap for youth – technopanics are barriers for children and teens to full, constructive participation in participatory culture and democracy.

SHARE: 9 comments

The Next Great Technopanic: Wireless Geo-Location / Social Mapping

by on July 12, 2008 · 30 comments

A few days ago, I posted an essay about the recent history of “moral panics,” or “technopanics,” as Alice Marwick refers to them in her brilliant new article about the recent panic over MySpace and social networking sites in general.

I got thinking about technopanics again today after reading the Washington Post’s front-page article, “When the Phone Goes With You, Everyone Else Can Tag Along.” In the piece, Post staff writer Ellen Nakashima discusses the rise of mobile geo-location technologies and services, which are becoming more prevalent as cell phones grow more sophisticated. These services are often referred to as “LBS,” which stands for “location-based services.”

Many of phones and service plans offered today include LBS technologies, which are very useful for parents like me who might want to monitor the movement of their children. Those same geo-location technologies can be used for other LBS purposes. Geo-location technologies are now being married to social networking utilities to create an entirely new service and industry: “social mapping.” Social mapping allows subscribers to find their friends on a digital map and then instantly network with them. Companies such as Loopt and Helio have already rolled out commercial social mapping services. Loopt has also partnered with major carriers to roll out its service nationwide, including the new iPhone 3G. It is likely that many other rivals will join these firms in coming months and years.

These new LBS services present exciting opportunities for users to network with friends and family, and it also open up a new world of commercial / advertising opportunities. Think of how stores could offer instantaneous coupons as you walk by their stores, for example. And very soon, you can imagine a world were many of our traditional social networking sites and services are linked into LBS tools in a seamless fashion. But as today’s Washington Post article notes, mobile geo-location and social mapping is also raising some privacy concerns:
Continue reading →

SHARE: 30 comments

Next Entries →