Good News, Bad News and a Stretched Metaphor

The more I investigate the parenting challenges discussed in this site, the more I realize just how pervasive these problems are. I've worked as a system administrator for twelve years and have dealt with the technical implications of computer security, but only recently have I started to see that much sought after "Big Picture."

A strange property of the Internet is that while it is built on fallible error prone equipment, the information stored in it is surprisingly resilient. This is because information, be it text, images or anything else that can be digitized is very easy to copy. So a computer hard drive can fail, or a network link can be broken, but if there are enough copies, the information is maintained. This is not entirely unlike how nature works. A given member of a species may meet an untimely death, but if enough of it's kin survive, then the species survives.

Arguments about copyright aside, this is generally a very good thing. The ease of copying makes digital information strong. However, as with all things, there is a dark side as well. Many pieces of information are best kept reasonably secret. Financial information, medical data and many other things are personal and not something we would generally be open about sharing. But this data is invariably digitized, and in the wrong hands, copies of this private data can be very damaging indeed.

Similarly, there are other forms of information that are unfortunately very resilient as well. The problems of child pornography, violent and other unhealthy content are widespread and nearly impossible to completely erradicate. As I've indicated before, removing one bad website means that it's content will likely show up somewhere else.

This is where I stretch my metaphore. In the United States, this past weekend was Labor Day so we had a three day weekend. My family performed our end of the summer tidy up to begin preparations for autumn. In our upstairs bathroom we have old fashion faucets with porcelain handles. I realized that yet again, it was time to clean the little spot of soap scum off the bottom of the handles. This crusty little spot is always there, just out of sight, and while I try to keep it clean, it invariably returns.

As I was scrubbing the crud off the faucet handles, I realized that the nasty content on the internet is like this soap scum. I do what I can to prevent it, but I can unfortunately never eradicate it forever. (I did warn you that this metaphor was about to be stretched!) Keeping a home computer up to date, installing anti-virus software and being mindful of your child's computer use keep the problems at bay and are simply part of the maintenance of our modern lifestyles.