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Feature Articles > Features > GamerDad vs. The Clinton Media Guide I
Senator Clinton offers a media guide for protecting children. We take it apart, peice by peice. Part 1: Protecting Kids Online. Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton released a handly little Media Safety guide to entertainment just in time for summer vacation. It's designed to give parents some advice about how their kids interact with all sorts of media. First, I want to congratulate her on the breadth of issues covered. There is some good information there. Just having all the different kinds of media listed out there on one page is a good wakeup call to some parents who may not realize just how many different things they need to be looking out for. This was a tough job. This is a lot of information to fit on a legal-sized piece of paper. There's not a lot of room to get in too deep. These are some very complicated issues. Again, just getting parents thinking about this is a good thing. But there are a couple things you need to watch out for if you try to implement this straight off the page. The Internet The Internet is a dangerous place for anyone, and particularly for kids. Parents really do need to start paying attention to where their kids are going online, and what they're doing here. And the advice given here is at least a start. My biggest problem with sites like CommonSense is their advice is very shallow. You get a good couple bullet-points, but there's no real help for people who are actually in that situation and trying to carry out the things they suggest. In CommonSense's Social Networking safety section they talk about the touchy subject of MySpace and other blogs. This is a good idea, and it's a fine article on the face of it except for two factual errors. You have a couple more options than they list searching for your child's blog on MySpace. The instructions they give are valid if you just use the box labelled "Search" in the upper right corner of the page, which only searches on Display Name. If you use their Search page you have a couple more options. On the homepage, choose "Search" from the top menu. In the "Find a Friend" box you can choose to search by Name (that's real name), Display Name (that's the name they chose), or by email (if you know the email address they used). This doesn't solve the major problem, though. If they lied in all three of those places, then you've got to resort to the instructions below. Second, Blogger's blogs are NOT strictly public. Anyone cannot just "read anything anytime" if it isn't set it up that way. I have several private blogs myself only available to other members of the blog - they don't appear on any list and you have no way of knowing they exist. That's how one of my writing groups handles critiquing each other's works and we've been doing it for over two years. The fact that they didn't know these things just underscores how quickly this world moves and how easy it is to miss important features, but it certainly doesn't make me any happier about taking their advice. If you think there are issues you might have concerns about, they suggest you try to find your child's profile via searching on the site in question. They do point out that kids often don't use their actual name. Okay as far as it goes but that does little actual good. Say they didn't use their real name. Now what? Randomly entering stuff you think they think sounds cool? That's highly ineffective if you don't spend enough time with the child to know what they like and how they might use that as a sign in name. Also, many of the names are used multiple times with only a number at the end to differentiate. Is your child "coolestband101" or "coolestband1224"? If hunting for them directly fails, they recommend you search on their friend's names. That can be a nightmare - my eldest son has over 120 "friends" on his MySpace of which maybe 20 I have ever heard of. Most of the rest are from school but have never been to my house or called, or people he's met randomly on MySpace. Good luck with that one. They're not any likelier than your child to be using their real name. And even if they do, knowing how to actually spell their friend's names is important. Is it "Kaitlynn" or "Caitlin" or what? If you've only heard the name how do you know? And, yes, they're all named Kaitlynn and Brittney. Well, not quite all of them but a heck of a lot of them. If you have that little contact with these things, the advice from CommonSense is not going to help much. Also, they're cutting it way too narrow. There are a lot more social networking sites out there. They mention Facebook, but they don't address MOG, which is an up and coming social networking site driven by the music choices on your hard drive. I can't wait until the RIAA finds out about this one. The same for the instant messaging clients, chat rooms, file sharing networks, anonymous email providers and such. They mention a couple, but there are literally hundreds of these things out there. Our SuggestionsI've got a couple ideas as an internet-savvy parent: Again, I do want to point out that we're glad she's weighed in on the topic. Her guide is a good start, and I hope it gets some people out there looking. Come in tomorrow for our look at her advice on video games.
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