The area that is considered the darkest, dankest area of the Internet involves sexual imagery. Not only are children being exposed to graphic pictures, as supporters of the decency act lamented, but all forms of deviancy are finding expression on the Internet. “People are really being allowed to open up, where they otherwise would not,” said Earl Jackson, a University of California-Santa Cruz professor, who makes extensive use of the Internet. Jackson argues that the medium’s anonymity is subverting fears sustained by prejudice. Not only gays, but foot fetishists, for example, or men enamored of obese women smoking cigarettes on the toilet can fulfill fantasies more readily through “billboards” and “chat rooms.”
But some suggest that the liberating effects of the technology also are opening a Pandora’s Box, sating people that society intends to frustrate. Consider the case now in federal court in Chicago of Richard Romero, a 38-year-old Florida man accused of befriending a suburban Chicago boy on the Internet and then traveling to the Chicago area to kidnap him. Romero not only is accused of using “chat rooms” to seduce the troubled boy. He allegedly indulged his sexual fantasy through a “virtual” community of pedophiles. Federal law enforcement officials said there are untold thousands of transmissions daily among pedophiles, though computer experts warn that even rough estimates are impossible. In Romero’s case, the government said his former landlords burned five leaf bags full of child pornography he allegedly acquired through the Internet.
“Society has to take a position to find out what is of more value: The well-being of our children, or the desire to see pornography on the Internet,” said Ruben Rodriguez, a supervisor at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. As people become inured to sex images, they require more outlandish material to become stimulated, Rodriguez said. And as this happens, the potential for aberrant behavior in the world away from the computer terminal increases.
“Did we have these problems 50 years ago?” he asked. “The deviant society has grown a lot.”Goodlatte, who serves on the House Judiciary Committee and helped shepherd the Communications Decency Act to passage, said it is not unreasonable to regulate the public places of the Internet, lest the moral cement of America begin to chip.
“The Internet is a new frontier. We don’t want it to be the Wild, Wild West,” he said. “It’s unrealistic to think that society should put down all of its standards in what could be the principal standard of communication for the next century.” But Stanton McCandlish, the program director for the libertarian Electronic Frontier Foundation, said the fears about the Internet and its effect on the nation’s moral fiber have historical analogues. “When the telephone was first put out for public use, people had a fit. People were extremely upset that strange men could call their wives in their homes. We don’t think of the phone in those terms anymore,” said McCandlish, who opposes regulation of the Internet. There will be spillage of bad speech, he said, anytime a new medium proliferates, as the Internet has done in the past three or four years.
As for changing the realm of behavior, McClandish said, “Maybe dangers of pedophile types are reduced by their sort of goofing off on the Internet. It probably tends to buffer them a lot from actual contact with real children.”
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Next: The seeds of hate
