Lies the media tells me ...
Does anyone feel that those "be careful what you post" announcements are just a tad too much?
I know there is a word for this general situation, I just can't find it but in long terms, the phenomenon of aggressively intimating the danger and emphasizing the likely hood of child abuse/molestation via the Internet, by the use of a cute adolescent female being gibed at by older males in the announcements ... I mean, honestly, it's almost impossible not to be aware of the potential danger (not just, but especially) children are in, especially in social networking sites (like MySpace, etc.), but to have it so harped on seems to me to lead to not being able to see the forest for the trees; the issue of maintaining a safe level of anonymity on-line gets lost in the over-hyping of the danger in not doing so.
Is it just me, or do all the safety precautions amount to remembering stranger danger? As I stated before, thanks to mass media, this issue has been over-hyped every where, so why are children still so at risk? With features like friends-locking on blogs and profiles, I can't understand how adolescent females would even be accessible to older males; or, at least, readily accessible. In perhaps protecting children from the big bad wolves, we have been setting them out into the world unawares and liable to the mistake the wolf for a friendly stray.