I heard a statement a few years ago that went along these lines, “Every single medium that exists today is in existence because of the drive of pornography.” Whether it be films (one of the first “new media” outlets to watch porn), video cassettes (created to distribute porn more easily than film reels), or the Internet (used to check e-mail, IM, and watch porn). Thanks to MIT’s Media Lab the new not-for-profit
One Laptop Per Child program—where schoolchildren in Nigerian where given a free laptop to be given “new opportunities to explore, experiment and express themselves”—these children were able to do what comes naturally to any male with technology: find porn.
Reuters Africa,
“Efforts to promote learning with laptops in a primary school in Abuja have gone awry as the pupils freely browse adult sites with explicit sexual materials.”
OLPC News dubs the program one pornographic image per child now. But, like all good things that come to an end, changes to the next round of laptops will include filters to prevent these children from doing what every child in developed worlds do—look at porn.
Won’t somebody think of the children??
More:
ShortNews.com
Tech.co.uk
TechShout
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July 23rd, 2007 at 8:51 am
ha, great, now that we’ve exposed them to porn, we are going to deny them it. Poor kids, don’t they have a hard enough life??
July 23rd, 2007 at 8:54 am
The fax machine may be the only piece of technology that wasn’t driven by porn…although Alexander Bain may have only realized this after seeing the quality of images transmitted.
July 23rd, 2007 at 1:19 pm
As an educator and optimist, I would like to think that MIT’s program WAS NOT driven by pornography but rather, to expose children growing up in poverty-stricken areas to technology and give them the opportunity to explore the world wide web. While MIT’s initial plan to distribute one lap top per child sounded great on paper, it was poorly executed and not completely thought out.
Teachers today have the responsiblity of teaching appropriate internet use. In this day in age, pornography sites come up in searches as innocent as attemots to find state capital flashcards. (Forgive me for stating the obvious, but students will not learn that the state capital of South Dakota is Pierre if a naked male or female happens to pop up on the screen). Therefore, it is clear that educators did not formulate this plan. The first thing teachers would have included on each laptop would have been a stringent filter juxtapose to AT LEAST five, instructional classes focusing on how to use a lap top.
And while the article expounds upon how males are using the device, why does it not impart how females are using the internet? So instead of making the presumptuous statement that porn drives everything, the more appropriate questions should be, “Why are males at ANY age intrinsically drawn to porn? & What are we doing as a society to control childrens’ access to such explicit material?”
July 23rd, 2007 at 1:26 pm
It took me twelve years to realize that Debbie wasn’t the mayor of Dallas. Thank you, Internet.