What is the negative impact of technology on children?
Technological advances have contributed to several ethical concerns. These ethical concerns threatened to destroy the trust and responsibility among humanity. The consequences of these ethical concerns necessitated establishment of several acts that would offer appropriate control and limitation in use and misuse of technology. Thus, this analytical treatise attempts to explicitly review the advances in information technology that resulted in establishment of new acts to control ethical concerns. The acts explored in this paper include the Children’s Internet Protection Act of 2000 and the Electronic Funds Transfer Act of 1978.
The use of internet as a communication tool has developed tremendously in the last decade. Reflectively, it has grown to encompass the aspect of information exchange and creation of cultures by special interest groups (Rooney, 2010). Same as face-to-face communication, internet media can reverse a group’s view of life either positively or negatively. If the content directed to an audience is demystifying, the final effect over a period of time is the same. Before introduction of the Children’s Internet Protection Act of 2000, very little regulation existed on protecting the minor against exposure to explicit sexual or violent material via the internet.
Pornography is an erotic representation material that is solely designed for instigating sexual arousal (Federal Communications Commission, 2010). In the legal language, obscenity is an offensive act that interferes with the morals and is unlimited in nature, that is may target the minors. On the other hand, adult pornography “has a limited access to adults and may be in the form of magazines, erotic books, recordings, and films that have parental advisory messages indicating the age of viewers” (Hieder & Jalongo, 2014, p. 15). Therefore, it was necessary to establish an act that would define the boundary of internet material users.
Through banning internet obscenity and pornography directed to minors, the Supreme Court endeavored to protect the moral of the society from decay as a result of unlimited explicit contents that may directly corrupt the minds of juveniles and other young irresponsible persons who may be easily swayed by what they see (Johnson, 2007). Thus, by banning, obscenity, the Supreme Court was reaffirming the rights of the society to protect its moral views and norms that would not arguer well its set limits of behavior. Since obscenity consists of materials that appeal to prurient interest and are utterly lacking social redeeming value (Goldfarb, 2002). Besides, these materials or acts are patently offensive since they affront community contemporary standards and basically valueless to the moral cycles of the societal building blocks (Federal Communications Commission, 2010).
Basically, the issue of decency was meant to protect minors from X rated content that would create fantasy, false judgment and lead to certain behavior that are not acceptable in the society. Thus, the Children’s Internet Protection Act of 2000 was informed by the rising abuse of internet use freedom by decadent bodies that were disseminating explicit content through internet to young people below the legal adult age bracket (Kraft & Wang, 2010). As a result, the Children’s Internet Protection Act of 2000 introduced criminal sanctions to a party or parties who knowingly “(A) uses an interactive computer service to send to a specific person or persons under 18 years of age, or (B) uses any interactive computer service to display in a manner available to a person under 18 years of age, any comment, request, suggestion, proposal, image, or other communication that, in context, depicts or describes, in terms patently offensive as measured by contemporary community standards, sexual or excretory activities or organs” (Federal Communications Commission, 2010, p. 02).
Thus, the Children’s Internet Protection Act of 2000 was initiated to counter the rising cases of internet sources abuse directed to the minors. This act targeted restoration of morality and decency in the society and protection of the minors from inappropriate internet materials that are easily accessible just by a click of the button (Australian Curriculum, 2015).
Movie selected: Captain America (2014), WALLE (2008), and Big Bang Theory (Bozeman Reaction S4/E2)
In the film, Captain America, the main theme is extracting data and protecting it from the wrong hands that want to destroy the world. In the film, WALLE, a robot with superficial human nature has a difficult task of cleaning the mess of mankind and ends up changing the world when he falls in love with another robot. Technology has been used in the film to explore the unlimited potential it has in changing humanity. Lastly, in the film, Big Bang Theory (Bozeman Reaction), the potential of technology to track evil is presented as beyond imagination. In fact, technology is packaged as the only sustainable means of managing crimes in the cities since criminals keep on changing their tactics. These films reveal the disadvantages wrong use of technology and ability of the same concepts to be applied to reverse the challenges posed by technological threats. The films prove that when technology falls in the wrong hands, then the consequences may be destructive.
References
Australian Curriculum. (2015). Applying social and ethical protocols and practices when using ICT. Web.
Federal Communications Commission, (2010). Children’s Internet Protection Act. Web.
Goldfarb, B. (2002). Visual Pedagogy. Media cultures in and beyond the classroom. Durham: Duke University Press.
Hieder, K., & Jalongo, M. (2014). Young Children and Families in the Information Age: Applications of Technology in Early Childhood. New York, NY: Springer.
Johnson, D. (2007). Does technology change how schools teach ethical behaviors? Web.
Kraft, E., & Wang, J. (2010). An Exploratory Study of the Cyberbullying and Cyberstalking Experiences and Factors Related to Victimization of Students at a Public Liberal Arts College. International Journal of Technoethics (IJT), 1(4), 74- 91. doi:10.4018/jte.2010100106
Rooney, T. (2010). Trusting children: How do surveillance technologies alter a child’s experience of trust, risk and responsibility? Surveillance & Society, 7(3–4), 344– 355.