Social networking, pornography, or mental illness?

Here's an archived post on Many2Many a group weblog on social software, from November 11, 2005:

I’ve been thinking a lot about how anti-MySpace propaganda has been rooted in the culture of fear. Given that youth play a critical, but different, role in social software, i suspect that folks might be interested in how MySpace is getting perceived as a scary, scary place.

Growing up in a culture of fear: from Columbine to banning of MySpacelooks at how mainstream media is inciting moral panic around youthparticipation in public spaces. The article is framed around the ban ofMySpace in certain schools. MySpace blamed for alienated youth’s threatsfollows up on this, looking specifically at how Columbine-esquesituations are still not being addressed for their core problem: youthalienation. Instead, we’re still blaming the technology.

Anyway, fear of pornography and sexual predators on the web continues to lead to efforts,aguably overkill, to shut down interactive portions of social networking sites.

A politically left view of John McCain's recent bill presents just a concern.

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet
Friday, December 15, 2006

Republican Senator John McCain has introduced legislation that would fine blogs up to $300,000 for offensive statements, photos and videos posted by visitors on comment boards, effectively nixing the open exchange of ideas on the Internet, providing a lethal injection for unrestrained opinion, and acting as the latest attack tool to chill freedom of speech on the world wide web.

McCain's proposal, called the "Stop the Online Exploitation of Our Children Act," encourages informants to shop website owners to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, who then pass the information on to the relevant police authorities.

Comment boards for specific articles are extremely popular and also notoriously hard to moderate. Popular articles often receive comments that run into the thousands over the course of time. In many cases, individuals hostile to the writer's argument deliberately leave obscene comments and images simply to sully the reputation of the website owners. Therefore under the terms of this bill, right-wing extremists from a website like Free Republic could effectively terminate a liberal leaning website like Raw Story by the act of posting a single photograph of a naked child. This precedent could be the kiss of death for blogs as we know them and its reverberations would negatively impact the entire Internet.

Senator John McCain's web site presents a different view, excerpts below, emphasis added.

Inrecent years, technology has contributed to the greater distributionand availability, and, some believe, desire for child pornography. Isay child pornography, but that label does not describe accurately whatis at issue. As emphasized by a recent Department of Justice report,“child pornography” does not come close to describing these images,which are nothing short of recorded images of child sexual abuse. These images are, quite literally, digital evidence of violent sexualcrimes perpetrated against the most vulnerable among us.

The violence ofthe images continues to increase as well. Dr. Sharon Cooper, anationally recognized expert on this subject, stated before a SeptemberSenate Commerce Committee hearing that the images often depict“sadistic gross sexual assault and sodomy.”

To better defineand expand the types of online companies obligated to report childpornography, the legislation would require a broad range of onlineservice providers – including web hosting companies, domain nameregistrars, and social networking sites – to report child pornographyto NCMEC.

Thelegislation would help ensure greater compliance with the childpornography reporting requirements under Federal law by increasingthree-fold the penalties for knowing failure to report childpornography to NCMEC. It would also move the reporting requirementfrom title 42, which relates to the public’s health and welfare, totitle 18, our Federal criminal code. This is to underscore that abreach of the reporting obligations is a violation of criminal law. Inaddition, the Act would eliminate the legal liability of online service providers for actions taken to comply with the child pornography reporting requirements.

What is not obvious from this point-in-time snapshot of this one front is how far the line has moved in the last few decades of what constitutes material that is socially acceptable to the community at large, and, for that matter, what "local community" is used for setting standards of decency, depravity, or criminal behavior.

The New York Times had a letter to the editor this morning that stunned me. I guess it's been a long time since my children were in school, but it seems to confirm that the 24 hour a day bathing in lifestyles on television and in movies does change the definitions of a great deal of life. It's against those standards that people measure themselves, with significant impact on depression or suicide if they don't "fit in" or "match up" to, say Britney Spear's behavior.

Here's the start of that Letter from the Times.

Middle School Girls gone Wild
Dec 29, 2006

...The scene is a middle school auditorium, where girls in teams of three or four are bopping to pop songs at a student talent show. Not bopping, actually, but doing elaborately choreographed re-creations of music videos, in tiny skirts or tight shorts, with bare bellies, rouged cheeks and glittery eyes.

They writhe and strut, shake their bottoms, splay their legs, thrust their chests out and in and out again. Some straddle empty chairs, like lap dancers without laps. They don’t smile much. Their faces are locked from grim exertion, from all that leaping up and lying down without poles to hold onto...The girls spend a lot of time lying on the floor. They are in the sixth, seventh and eighth grades.

As each routine ends, parents and siblings cheer, whistle and applaud. I just sit there, notfully comprehending. It’s my first suburban Long Island middle school talent show. I’m with my daughter, who is 10 and hadn’t warned me. I’m not sure what I had expected, but it wasn’t this.

I have to wonder, if 20 years of media assault has transformed Little House on the Prarie to the above scene in middle school regarding sex, what has the last decade of sadomasochistic and dark, psychotic violence in the media done to the internal working of our children and the new generation regarding what is the norm for interpersonal behavior and what we "expect" them to be like.

We have to ask, keeping Glasser's book Fear in mind, whether this concern is hyped up and everything is well with a few exceptions, or whether the social fabric is becoming completely unravelled. Is Long Island representative of what's going on in the rest of the US?

And, on a global scale, if this is the fact that te USA presents to the world and says "We want you to be more like us", I can understand why some cultures are not buying what we're selling.

We may have the paradoxical world in which Islamic culture views the entire USA the way John McCain views the web.

There is certainly a basis here for a motivation besides "envy" for parents rejecting the new American model of "A wonderful life". And, as with the auto industry, what we're selling as social norms may not be what the world prefers to buy.

And, judging from the rate of depression, violence, and suicide among youth today, this may not even be what the audience or "consumers" of this material really want to buy.