My point is that blocking fails and always will. I am all for education about internet safety and believe that schools need to worry about what their students are doing. But, blocking just makes a nice challenge for students to bypass. They would benefit far more from making it harder to hide computer screens and making kids understand they are in a school context and must use computers in that way.

As for sexual harassment, etc. online, half of this conduct is done by other kids and young adults as a joke. There is a huge subculture throughout image boards and gaming which will spam “tits or gtfo” and ask for nudes or make sexual innuendo as a matter of course. Obviously we need to teach our children not to post nudes (they still haven’t learned this…). But, we need to get away from alarmism online. Eventually we will have to forget the moral outrage at how people use anonymity and instead focus on real areas of safety. I think older adults who have no exposure to this don’t understand and even if they find it distasteful they have to teach children the difference between trolling and threat.

Thanks for the mention during the podcast! Listened to it and think it’s great that there are some professors with the times.

We have some more opinionated pieces coming down the tubes this week. Keep your eyes out for those. It will be interesting to see if you guys agree with us. 🙂