Observer Online | Viewpoints

Posted March 21, 2007

Parents, Children Need to Study New Rules for The Internet Age

When I was graduating from the University of Montana in the early 1990s, the School of Journalism had a room filled with computers for students to use during class or after hours to work on assignments and papers.

The computers were called Mac Classics, and they were little tall boxes with tiny, 8-inch fuzzy black-and-white screens. I used the room extensively during my senior year. Nobody I knew had a personal computer in his or her room.

I spent hours writing my senior thesis in that computer room, and saving it onto a little floppy disk. That disk failed and almost scuttled my graduation, but then as now there was always someone else who knew more about computers than I did who could fix the problems they cause.

Computer use when I was in college was strictly functional, not entertainment. There was no Internet, no World Wide Web. There were no networks through which people could communicate. I imagine someone on the campus might have had e-mail in 1992, but it had not even begun to change the way we communicate as it has in the last decade.

Today, computers are often used more for entertainment than work, more for communicating than for writing papers. The computer has become a communication tool that few could have predicted 25 years ago. And while that has been a great development in many ways, it has brought along a dark side with it.

And that is why Congressman Frank Wolf (R-10th) has put together a forum for parents, children, law enforcement experts and computer gurus to discuss the dangerous side of the Internet and children. There has been a growing focus on educating parents about what their children do when they are on a computer, but for parents my age and older, it's hard to imagine all the ways a child can get into trouble in the digital age.

Popular social networking Web sites like MySpace and FaceBook didn't exist when I was younger, and to this day I have no knowledge of how they work or why anyone would want to post personal information on a forum such as those. People have even begun to make a living by advising others how they should manage their online persona, giving tips on how having the right information on a personal Web page can make the difference in being hired for the right job.

And having the wrong information on a Web page, like pictures of you at a frat party during your freshman year, can disqualify you for all kinds of things down the road.

But the real concern is how easy it is for children to fall prey to criminals on the Internet. Computers are comforting in a way because of their anonymity, but that anonymity also makes it easy for people with evil intentions to prey on the innocent and unsuspecting.

Eight years ago it was just e-mail. Then it was Instant Messaging. Now, there are so many ways for children to come into contact with strangers by using computers on the Internet it's impossible to keep track before the next thing is invented.

Some law enforcement experts estimate that at any one time there may be 50,000 predators online attempting to take advantage of children, and social networking sites are the predators' playground.

But it's not just standard Internet sites. Today, your child can play video games with other people over the Internet using gaming systems such as PlayStation and Xbox. Playing with others makes the game more fun, but it also provides another opportunity for strangers to come into contact with children. While the game plays, players can converse or text message as if they were in a chat room instead of a game room.

To make it even more challenging for parents to keep up with their children, technology continues to develop at an exponential rate. What criminals and children and doing today may be completely out of fashion in six months, and it will be the parents and law enforcement officials who are scrambling to figure out what everybody is up to nowadays.

This isn't to imply that children are always looking for trouble, and letting them have freedom on the Internet is always a bad thing. But children are not adults, and sometimes they don't recognize a dangerous person or dangerous situation until it is too late to get away.

My pick for "event of the week" for any parent of a middle school-aged child is to attend the forum Rep. Wolf has arranged and talk to his or her children about the dangers of the Internet. Just like you taught them the rules when they got to ride their bike out of your sight for the first time, discussing rules with children about computer use is equally important.

The forum, "Keeping Your Children Safe Online," will be held Tuesday, March 25, at 7 p.m. at Potomac Falls High School, at 46400 Algonkian Parkway in Potomac Falls.