Childproofing the Internet
My nine-year old brother would happily spend his entire weekend designing model rocketships, building impressively creeper-proof houses in Minecraft, and reading about the neurology of a kangaroo. He’s an intelligent, active kid with some time on his hands — and, like most intelligent, active kids, he spends a whole lot of time on the internet. This is in and of itself a simultaneously good and bad thing. The Internet, grand and imposing monster entity that it is, has much to offer for people of all ages. It is relatively easy to navigate, informative on just about any imaginable subject, entertaining, absurdly time-consuming, and interconnected.
This last characteristic is what compels a lot of parents to cringe and shut off their routers. A previous post on this blog touched on the internal strength of Wikipedia as a network. I’m sure I’m not the only one who has wasted valuable time playing “the Wikipedia game”, a competition in which bored laptop-holders compete to be the first to get from one Wikipedia article to a seemingly completely unrelated article just by clicking the links on the page (no Ctrl + F; that would be cheating). Wikipedia is only a part of the whole; the Internet is, essentially, a giant connected network. Websites link to other websites, social network users connect to other users, and Tweets share common tags. People aren’t always who they say they are. Weird Al writes a harmless and hilarious parody of a pop song, but what other potentially-offensive songs have been marked as favorites by the same YouTube account? To exactly what sort of fanfiction will that Hogwarts Sorting Hat quiz link? And So-And-So likes to post videos of trains on Instagram, but what else does So-And-So upload? I mean this all lightly, of course, but what I’m getting at should be relatively clear; simply put, there is a lot of stuff out there, and some of it is not for young eyes.
Many parents turn to password-protection, specialized desktops, and extra security software to preclude their children’s negative experiences on the internet. If we were to diagram the complete network of the internet and color-code the edges (links) between nodes (web addresses) that are harmful and innocent in red ink, installing such restrictions would be the equivalent of forcing anyone under a certain age to view the diagram through red cellophane. Antivirus programs and security software such as AVG Family Safety are widely available and have generally positive reviews, but not everyone has, can afford to get, or wants red cellophane. Right at the source itself — the internet — how do we filter out the “good” from the “bad”?
A Norwegian company called Kuddle has recently kicked off its solution to this complex puzzle. According to a NY Times article by Jenna Wortham, it started when Kuddle’s chief executive Ole Vidar Hestås noticed that his 6-year-old son was just as eager to view and share Instagram photos as his older sisters were. Hestås launched Kuddle as “training wheels for the Internet”, and intends for it and services like it to “help kids learn how to use social media before they graduate to the big leagues” (quote from Kuddle). On the app released for Apple and Android in May, users can edit and share pictures in what is meant to be a safe environment that provides an introduction to social media. Kuddle hasn’t quite made it big in the U.S. yet, but it is the employer of fifteen people in Oslo and has plans to continue a local and eventually global outreach. Larger-scale companies than Kuddle are also beginning to capitalize on the rising demand for a childproof web; Wortham claims that Google is thinking about developing YouTube and Gmail branches just for kids.
The inevitable challenge attached to childproofing the internet is that it is a truly monumental and unrealistic task. If we treat the modern world’s accessible internet as a connected network with web addresses as nodes and search terms and links as edges, then to childproof it at its core is to sever its edges left and right. The result of this idealistic approach is two almost-components: The Grown-Up Internet and The Child Internet, with a few unidirectional local bridges from the adult side to the childrens’ side. Actualizing such a distinction would be more or less impossible and arguably not even a good idea. A better and more realistic plan is to foster the development of connected segments and subsegments, and it seems that Kuddle has set out to do just this.
My hope is that the internet in all its explosivity and explicitness is on its way to becoming a safer and more streamlined resource for kids. I will thank Kuddle for its innovation and courage on the day my brother can watch tutorials on building robots without timidly asking me to X-out “mature”, clickjack-induced popup windows.
Sources:
http://securitywatch.pcmag.com/privacy/313540-infographic-how-to-childproof-your-internet