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Some geeks in a small town in the Cape of our country, South Africa, hacked together a mobile Java MSN client. They called it MXit and gave it away free. Given the disproportionately high difference in price per byte of SMS vs GPRS provided by our mobile operators. It caught on quickly.
However, the media, and indeed a seemingly large chunk of parents have become very concerned about the latest evil in our society. A rather tech savvy journalist friend of mine just included the phrase "A Society in Crisis" in his last blog entry on the subject, and our daily news tells of an emotionally scarred teenager who just had a 'helluva' ordeal. He'll probably never love again, poor kid.
This topic has been grating my tit for some time now, and I felt the need to counter-rant.
When I was a young wipper-snapper, my friends and I would spend enormous amounts of time on computers. My mother tried to take me for counseling, and often resorted to stealing parts of it to hide in her car, so I couldn't use it while at work. She was scared of a new technology she didn't understand. She was wrong to be.
Later, when THE INTERNET hit, I would go over to friends who had modem's house's. We would stay up all night in 'chat rooms'. That was the only thing our blazing fast 24.4 modems could handle that kept us entertained longer than 10 minutes, and you can only read the anarchist cookbook so many times. At first we chatter as we would to friends, then we realised nobody was who they said we were and started doing the same. We pretended to be everyone from the fat, balding idiot, to the randy teenage girl looking to cyber.
Later we discovered IRC, which had many more users, and now that we had 33.6 modems we could chat so much faster. There you could talk about everything from the song that just played on your local music station, to how to hack a VAX while building thermite light bulb bombs to help with your safecracking experiments. There were cyber-pedophiles, switched-on-psychos and unix geeks, the full gamut of cyber filth. And many people were addicted. I have friends who had their computers taken away because of it.
Somehow we managed to pull through these dark days, with nary a whimper from our journo friends. Mostly because they didn't know what this 'eye-arr-cee' thing was or how to stick their WordPerect keyboard short-cut sticker on their screen. But this was serious shit my man. A google for "irc addiction" comes up with over 2 million hits now-a-days.
The reason we didn't turn into whimpering, emotionally scarred shadows-of-our-former-selves, is because our parents gave us some sound grounding in basic principles:
- Don't get into a car with a stranger
- Don't accept candy from a stranger
- Don't let a stranger in the house
- Don't give out your details to strangers on the phone or at the door
My adolescent brain was able to extrapolate these into an online world to something that would definitely exclude "going to meet a stranger by myself". This is not to say having a pedophile make advances at you isn't emotionally scarring, rather that using MSN on your cellphone isn't going to scar you. Freaks are everywhere, at schools, churches, book stores, the white house and on-line. My friend Colin sums it up perfectly:
I don’t believe you should pin a social problem on a technology when education and responsibility should begin at home.
He's exactly right. Now I've said nothing new. So where do you find the daily news journalists off button?