> > And so I am very interested in hearing the people who have spoken about television speak in the same manner about the Internet. Have at it.
>
> Well, I have to think that the Internet is fundamentally different from television in one important respect - it is, as you said, more active. If we assume for the moment that watching bad television will make people do bad things, then it is entirely possible that, if children sit in front of the television for hours, they will encounter some bad television shows. I don't see that possibility with the internet, simply because you *have* to choose, at every step of the way, what you want to see. You're not going to be reading RinkWorks and suddenly find yourself whisked off to a porn site (though you might run across a reader review in IABBBBM that causes some filters to block RinkWorks for "inapropriate content ;-}). Anybody who ends up at a porn site most likely wanted to be there (or wanted to be somewhere else that links to that porn site - I've not yet seen any respectable, family-friendly sites that do so). With the internet, you can't just sit there and be "subtly corrupted" like you could by television - you have to seek the corruption if you want to find it.

Now, your comment about "anybody who ends up at a porn site most likely wanted to be there" brings up another question, which is still somewhat on the subject:

Everyone's probably come across one of those many pieces of junk e-mail which contains nothing more than a web site address-- no context, no meaningful subject line, nothing but a URL. And admittedly, experienced net surfers-- and heck, pretty much anyone with common sense-- can pretty easily surmise what's generally being advertised (and can respond with a quick press of the delete key as fast as anything). But what about a newbie--or even a child--who receives this same spam and clicks on the link, not knowing what's hiding behind it?

-- codeman"hmm..."38