Tuesday, July 22, 2008

The Internet: Technological Revolution or Business as Usual?

The other day while I was waging a pitched battle with my five year old son over something that seemed crucial at the time but is totally unmemorable now, my eight year old daughter came careening up with a copy of Entertainment Weekly, the issue with the “Comic-Con ’08 Preview.” She held up the page with the panels from Ender’s Game and asked in a tremulous voice, “What is happening?” Since I’m a certified media studies person sensitive to issues of kids and media, of course I turned on a dime, forgot about my fight with Wyatt, and settled in on the sofa for a nice snuggly media literacy session. Right? Wrong. In my frantic state, I flung my hands in the air (like I just don’t care) and said “I don’t know! I can’t tell you! I just don’t know!” And then, I barked, “And that’s a grown up magazine anyway, you shouldn’t be reading it!” End scene.

The next day she and I were in the Video Library rental place. I was trying to find a copy of Eastern Promises and she was lurking around in the comics section. I’m not that up on recent graphic novels but I’ve seen a few in the past that freaked me out. So I kept throwing glances over there and worrying that she would come across something horrible, but at the same time I was feeling ashamed of my censorship cop behavior and wanted to give her some freedom. She’s a sensitive person – she came home from Wall-E in tears – so part of why I reacted so inappropriately to the Ender’s Game question came of frustration at the futility of trying to protect her from weirdness. But at the same time she heads for the comics like a moth to the flame and has to be pried loose, so why should I hold her back from her appreciation of art? This was my internal struggle, but luckily she stayed near the kids’ shelf and all was well.

On our way home, I tried to do the right thing and address what happened with the Entertainment Weekly magazine. I told her I was sorry I was so abrupt and dismissive, and then I tried to explain what was happening in the panels – basically a boy was having a microchip removed from the back of his neck, and part of the whole alien mythology (myths are stories we tell that express our hopes and fears) is that people get abducted by aliens and get chips in their necks, so the aliens could monitor us, kind of like what we do to migratory animals, and this story looked like a play on that, and blah blah blah … the usual kind of over-explanation that makes her glaze over … finally she interrupts me and asks, but why does he seem so CALM about it?

I guess, because of Novocaine. What’s novocaine? It’s a drug doctors use to numb your skin so surgery doesn’t hurt. Oh. And that was the end of the conversation. Apparently she wasn’t too worried about the alien chips aspect of the thing.

So what’s my point in posting this evidence of my poor parenting skills? Just this: I think another reason why I tack back and forth between “The impact of the Internet is immeasurable!” and “Eh, there’s nothing new under the sun,” is because as far as the mundane details of my life are concerned, hardly anything troublesome comes of the Internet. It’s incredibly easy to monitor. We rigged it so she can’t go anywhere we haven’t already vetted. On the other hand, just about everything I have trouble handling, in terms of assessing its “effects” on my child, comes from print and television, and it’s usually stuff that I brought into the house! I have trouble handling the idea that my darling sunshiny innocent daughter will encounter a world of perversion and darkness. Putting her on the PBSKids website is probably one of the “safest” things I can do with her – it’s a better electronic babysitter than the tube ever was. It’s like a padded-wall playpen in the middle of a madhouse, but it's probably too young for her now and I have to let her grow up. This is a question of boundaries and barriers, and what audience I’m locating my kids in. Also, regarding Fernando's observations about Radway and Callejo: I'm not "using" media properly, if that means taking advantage of its complexities and using it to the utmost (and taking advantage of the teaching moments it provides). I'm far more wary of "real" than virtual space when it comes to the absolutely most important things in my life.

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