Entertainment & Pop Culture - Internet

By Jerry Price - May 1, 2006 - comment

When children in the family are going to be allowed on the Internet, a Safe Surfing Family Contract may help steer them in the right direction. Some suggested guidelines are:

  • I promise to enjoy my use of the Internet and will work to make it a rewarding experience.
  • I promise never to reveal my real name, our address, or our telephone numbers to anyone that my parents don’t know.
  • I promise not to arrange to meet with anybody from Cyberspace without first checking with my parents.
  • I promise to honor the parental controls set for me and will not attempt to disable or short-circuit them.
  • I promise to quickly notify my parents if I ever receive a message that is wrong or makes me feel uncomfortable.
  • I promise not to download a file that someone sends me without first checking with my parents.
  • I promise not to purchase anything from the Internet without my parents’ permission, including the daily specials.
  • I promise to remain online no more than what my parents think is appropriate.
  • [Optional:] I promise to pay my share of the online service fees associated with my Internet activity.

Robert G. DeMoss, Jr., Learn to Discern (Grand Rapids: Zondervan Publishing House, 1997), 114-115.

“We are already, as it happens, a casually and chronically pornographic society. We dress young girls in clothes so scant and meretricious that honest harlots are all but bereft of any distinctive method for catching a lonely man’s eye. The popular songs and musical spectacles we allow our children to listen to and watch have transformed many of the classic divertissements of the bordello—sexualized gamines, frolicsome tribades, erotic spanking, Oedipal fantasy, very bad ‘exotic’ dance—into the staples of light entertainment. The spectrum of wit explored by television comedy runs largely between the pre- and the post-coital. In short, a great deal of the diabolistic mystique that once clung to pornography—say, in the days when even Aubrey Beardsley’s scarcely adolescent nudes still suggested to most persons a somewhat diseased sensibility—has now been more or less dispelled. But the Internet offers something more disturbing yet: an ‘interactive’ medium for pornography, a parallel world at once fluid and labyrinthine, where the most extreme forms of depravity can be cheaply produced and then propagated on a global scale, where consumers (of almost any age) can be cultivated and groomed, and where a restless mind sheltered by an idle body can explore whole empires of vice in untroubled quiet for hours on end. Even if filtering software were as effective as it is supposed to be (and, as yet, it is not), the spiritually corrosive nature of the very worst pornography is such that—one would think—any additional legal or financial burden placed upon the backs of pornographers would be welcome.”

David B. Hart, “The Pornography Culture,” The New Atlantis (http://www.thenewatlantis.com/archive/6/hart.htm), Summer 2004 [Accessed December 15, 2005]

  1. Eight in 10 Americans have Internet access from any location. In January 1999, half of Americans had access to the Internet from any location. As of January 2005, nearly seven in 10 (69%) access the Internet from home, and one-third access the Internet at work. When locations such as school, college or public library are included, the proportion of Americans with Internet access rises to 81%.
  2. Two-thirds of Americans say they have used the Internet in the past week. In January 2005, nearly three-quarters (72%) of Americans have used the Internet in the last month, and about two-thirds (65%) have used the Internet in the last week.
  3. Residential broadband Internet access is now just as common as dial-up access. In January 2001, 13% of Americans with Internet access at home used a broadband connection. In January 2005, 48% of people who live in homes with Internet access have broadband access, and 48% have dial-up access. Among those with broadband Internet access at home, 53% use cable modem service and 44% use DSL.
  4. The number of Americans who made a purchase from a Web site in the past week has more than tripled since 2001. In 2001, 4% of Americans purchased online in the past week, compared with 14% in January 2005. Nearly one-third of Americans have purchased from a Web site in the past month in January 2005 versus 16% in 2001.
  5. Growing numbers of consumers are using software to protect against pop-ups, spam, spyware and banner ads. Two-thirds of those who access the Internet at home use software to block spam, more than six in 10 (62%) use pop-up blocking software, more than half (54%) use software to block spyware, and 47% use software to block banner ads.

Internet Usage Trends, Internet & Multimedia 2005: The On-Demand Media Consumer (Arbitron/Edison Media Research) [Accessed December 19, 2005]

Further Learning

Learn more about: Family, Parenting, Pop Culture, Sexual Purity, Pornography

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