Creative Alternatives to the Issues of Censorship
Creative Alternatives to the Issues of Censorship
News flash: A 12 year old kills a 6 year old by practicing wrestling moves on her he learned from WWF Smack Down. A 13-year old boy shoots and kills a classmate with a gun he ordered from the Internet. As we can see in these disturbing incidents, violence amongst youngsters is on the rise. One of the forces driving our youth to violence is the media, such as TV and the Internet, to which children have easy access. To prevent violence, adults must take responsibility and take action. Censoring the media is one method. However, censoring the media would infringe the rights of adults. Rather than censoring the Internet and television, we should develop technologies that make it easier for parents to restrict their children’s access to offensive materials on TV and the Internet.
The government should not have authority to restrict the access of adults to any kind of material. If the government is allowed to restrict adults’ basic rights and freedoms, then a domino effect will begin and more of our rights will be taken away. They may start restricting all kinds of things like newspaper articles and everyday clothing. We American adults didn’t do anything to deserve having our rights taken away. These types of rights were given to us in the Constitution. Adults may regulate the lives of their children, but we adults are not the children of the government. Therefore, we shouldn’t be regulated.
Furthermore, censoring the Internet is almost impossible. Regardless of first amendment rights, the Internet has gotten too large to control. The worldwide web, as it’s called, is just that, worldwide. Even if all U.S. sites are regulated, America still cannot censor sites from overseas. The best compromise would probably be to create a rating system for U.S. sites similar to television today and create software to censor sites with a certain rating. This would allow parents to censor the Internet for their children but still leave the Internet free of regulation for the most part. The problem would arise when a site from another country was downloaded that doesn’t have a rating. How would someone censor that? This problem is where the impossibility comes to...