Reflections of a millennium mum

Prior to video and the internet, the worst material parents had to worry about their children getting hold of was a Playboy Magazine. For the parents of today’s children it is everything from bestiality to child porn and whatever is in-between. The internet has brought us every fetish under the sun, with parents and educational institutions charged with the responsiblity of controlling access to material from an ever-increasing array of technologies.

Today’s parents have to balance a respect for freedom of expression with a responsibility for the morality of their children in a time of rapid technological and social change. Change brings uncertainty and the increasing flux of technologically driven change brings to parents never before seen challenges.

The debate over the government’s mandatory internet filter brings us face to face with the reality of the loss of parental control over the kind of material to which children have access. How many parents today can say that they are able to choose what their children have access to; given that in many houses it is the children who set up internet access for parents and not the other way around?

Moral education which underlies and guides behaviour is seen as the parental responsibility. Yet how realistic is it to put that responsibility entirely on parents in a milieu where shock humour is the new standard, where boundaries of taste and morality are breached to feed a constant titillation and where children are more technologically literate than their parents?

In a constantly changing world how do we teach our children there are boundaries? When does titillation become objectification and objectification become deviance? Authors such as Clive Hamilton and Naomi Klein point out that consumerism is basically a culture in itself now: our children grow up completely submerged in the media with no boundaries between advertising and editorial, between information and indoctrination. “Hegemony … lies with the marketers and the culture makers in the media. For them, pushing the boundaries is now a marketing technique.” (Clive Hamilton in The Monthly, August 2008).

From the crèche to the grave our children are being sold movie plo.ts with their McDinners, product placement with their news and movies and “reality” media which promotes in every child the idea that they too can raise themselves from obscurity to media-mainstream if they do something stupid or offensive enough to become a YouTube hit. Rather than learning boundaries and judgment this new world is teaching our children that boundaries are bad, commonsense is passé and the weird and wacky is the highest form of entertainment.

Pity the parents and teachers who have to compete with this 24/7 stream-of-anti-consciousness and try to teach their children that consumerism is not a value, celebrity is not a role model and the media advertorial is not the fourth estate. Surrounded by this moral nihilism it becomes more and more difficult for parents to cultivate and maintain a sense of authority when the validity of boundaries is constantly undermined, not only by popular culture but by the fashionably intellectual as well.

According to Simon Hackett, managing director of Telecommunications company Internode, in an interview for ZDNet (October 3, 2008) on Labor’s mandatory internet filter: “The problem is we live in a world with multiple sets of morality, all of them equally valid.”

Are these ideas symptomatic of the solution or the problem? As parents we can not simply sit on the fence. If multiple sets of morality are equally valid then where do parents find the defence for those they choose to preference? In this epoch of moral relativism, many parents struggle with how to justify a sense of values when faced with the cultural elite’s discourse on the evils of privileging one value system over another.

Set adrift in a sea of anomie and drowned out by marketing phantasmagoria it is easy for parents to be worn into submission and question the legitimacy of their values and the imposition of these on their children.

One does not have to be a dysfunctional family to have difficulty controlling their young person’s access to material on the internet. As the anti-filter protesters state at every turn, existing computer filters can be by-passed by the determined teen. Apart from the contemporary distaste for promoting norms for sexual behaviour, the rapid development of technology which constantly outstrips most efforts to manage it, underlines the impracticality of the cries from the IT crowd that parents alone should bear the burden of responsibility.

The technology loving 20 and 30 somethings who blithely claim it is up to the parents and schools to “take responsibility” for the values and actions of our children, have probably never had to figure out how to convince a healthy teenager why she should not starve herself, nor convince a teenage boy that his sexual objectification of women may mean that his future loves will never feel attractive; no matter how much he adores them.

As Fiona Patten of the newly formed Australian Sex Party explains in The Sydney Morning Herald  (December 18, 2008) of her 1,500 members (both male and female) the majority are under the age of 30 - not exactly the voice of parents forced to navigate uncharted technical and moral territory brought on by the ever increasing pace of change which now characterises life.

With shock humour normalised in South Park and Family Guy we can forget that boundaries can and should exist and where to draw the line. The democratisation of the media via the internet has not led to a generation of politically active and aware teenagers, but a generation of politically switched off youth who would rather be in the news for throwing drug parties than organising protests against repression or injustice.

The civil libertarians, with their high ideals are not defending today’s dissidents but the ever more insidious ways in which exploitative and consumerist propaganda is leeched into the minds of our growing children: telling them what to buy in order to express their identities as the ideal consumer. If our capacity to think in terms of moral boundaries has been eroded, how then, can ethical decision making be taught or inspired if we do not bother to draw boundaries around behaviour of which we disapprove?

David Quilty, Managing Director of Public Policy with Telstra would have us believe the internet was founded on the ideal of free speech.

The internet was born out of freedom of speech. Child pornography is absolutely abhorrent, it’s insupportable. But when you start getting into grey areas, I think it’s very difficult to consider having governments deciding what people should and shouldn’t watch.(7:30 Report, November 24, 2008).

The internet was not born out of free speech; it was created by, and for, the US defence force as the answer to Russia’s launch of Sputnik. The internet was designed to be an indestructible network, resilient to attack and impervious to control.

From the same interview, Michael Malone, CEO of iinet would have us believe that his main concern is not the bottom line threatened by a potential decrease in transmission of illegal content, but with child safety. Malone compared the internet to a red light district and says parents should bear full responsibility for the consequences of this. “If you want to keep your children safe on the internet, the only way to achieve that is to actually sit with them while they’re on the internet. You wouldn’t drop your child at Kings Cross … you would walk through with them … ”

When the internet is taking over as a medium for more and more daily activities, continual supervision becomes increasingly unrealistic.

The report Little Children are Sacred (2007) from the Inquiry into the Protection of Aboriginal Children from Sexual Abuse, reveals that unsupervised internet access is precisely what has become the norm in remote communities where access to mainstream media is unavailable and access to cable television and the internet is the sole entertainment. The report outlines a normalisation of sexual violence in some communities that has become ingrained over recent history. Whether parental neglect from multiple causes has led to aberrant sexual norms or whether the availability of porn has contributed to the neglect of children in these communities is a chicken and egg question similar to all research that attempts to find causal connections between viewing pornography and/or violence and incidence of abuse.

A review of the literature on these matters drives home just how difficult it is to prove a “causal” link in social behaviour. Those who oppose technologies aimed at filtering internet and peer-to-peer content find this difficulty a convenient hook for their criticism. While official research might be some way from a conclusion on any causal link between the influence of technology and pornography on behaviour, recently released Victorian crime statistics show 15-19 year olds were more likely to be distributing pornographic images of themselves and others than any other age group (Sun Herald July 2, 2008).

While the answer to fighting such alarming trends in society may not begin and end with technology it does pose the question of where we do begin to address this? If we are not trusted with our own democracy; if we cannot trust our own intuition and common sense to debate and agree on a set of values for our society, then the industry-affiliated opponents to mandatory filtering are right that technology is not the answer. However it is certainly part of the problem and needs to be part of the solution especially given that the telecommunications industry reaps such a large profit from the sharing of this content.

The debate over internet censorship has brought us an opportunity to think about the technical and social worlds inhabited by our children (convergent as these are), as well as highlight the need to formulate boundaries within which our children can grow into their adult selves. Raising the issue of sexuality with children and rebellious teenagers creates certain challenges but also gives parents an opportunity to reconsider their own beliefs: to either discard or reinforce them. Society also has a role to play supporting parents to uphold their values, perhaps more so in this era of solipsistic nihilism than ever before.