A Second Set of Issues with The Internet Playground

What intrigued me about Seiter’s argument (at least in the chapters that we covered) is that she doesn't spend much time on the nature of home computer use by children. Granted, this makes sense for the scope of her argument: it would require a secondary research structure to access and assess the these children, probably doubling the size and confusing the argument of her book. Her argument is also explicitly focused on communities and social groups that have limited or problematic access to computers, and only 10% of the children in the less affluent Washington school have access to home computers. Nevertheless, I think this is an important topic to breach.

I was reminded of my experiences babysitting two preteen sisters in college. These girls were part of an affluent family, a financial position which allowed their mother to set aside an old laptop for the girls’ personal use. As far as I could tell, their mom had not set up any filters or blockages on the computer, trusting them to stick to a set of familiar, pre-approved websites: Club Penguin (a site that would fit well into Seiter’s discussion of internet pets in chapter 5), iCarly, and so forth.  

 On the one hand, I applauded their mom for resisting the urge to micromanage her children’s decisions with firewalls such as those Sara mentioned experiencing at her high school. These girls had the ability to explore, but their online choices were usually quite good: after teaching them how to pronounce one of the longest English words one week, I came back the next to find them attempting to research how to spell it, and trying to figure out how to use a thesaurus.

On the other hand, this freedom exposed them to some questionable content, which may not need to be directly censored, but was a cause for worry. The girls loved YouTube, for example, and despite the site’s internal censorship of content inappropriate for young audiences, they still delighted in (and memorized the dance and lyrics to) music videos by Ke$ha and Rihanna, troubling role models for a 9- and 11-year old.

As Seiter discusses, the internet allows children to use their creativity to explore and learn; the children in the New Dehli NIIT “Hole in the Wall” project gained technological skills and learned from the internet at rates that even surprised the researchers (11). Enforcing some kind of content filter for children seems only appropriate. The problem is there is no good way to encourage exploration into new territory without incurring some danger of that territory proving treacherous.