The Internet Fetishist

...There are a few principles of a civilized society that the vast majority of Americans actually agree on...

...Of all the villains determined to spoil the young people's innocent fun, one in particular drives Katz crazy: William Bennett...

...Hardcore sex and violence on the Internet present no such problem...

...In his new book, Virtuous Reality, Katz makes almost the same claims for the youth culture of the 1990s that Bob Dylan and Charles Reich did for the youth culture of the 1960s...

...Merely to raise the issue of Internet or pop-culture content, in Katz's view, is to be a "Mediaphobe," and a Mediaphobe is not just mistaken but pathetically ignorant, "afraid for himself of what he doesn't know or is too intimidated to learn...

...He celebrates this new consciousness as a genuine rebirth of free thought and expression in America...

...Reading Virtuous Reality is like listening to a man shrieking at the top of his lungs for everyone else to calm down...

...If I can find that much trash that quickly, any intelligent 10-year-old with a prurient curiosity can find it too, and maybe faster than I. The real question is whether we need to be worrying about this...

...And on the narrow question of proof, he is right...

...Katz believes that access to the Internet is giving young people a common language and a sense of generational solidarity that will forever set them apart from their elders...

...He cites studies that have found pornography constitutes less than one-half of one percent of all Internet messages, and says most offensive Internet material is actually available only to adults who pay for it with credit cards...

...But in devoting a significant chunk of his book to Bennett-bashing, Katz sets a tone of ad hominem pettiness that taints just about everything else he tries to say...

...There's nothing we can do about that...

...Parents who thoughtlessly ban access to online culture or lyrics they don't like or understand, or who exaggerate and distort the dangers of violence and pornographic imagery, are acting out of arrogance, imposing brute authority...

...He considers the would-be regulators to be narrow-minded modern incarnations of Anthony Comstock and the Society for the Suppression of Vice...

...Books//Arts_ The Internet Fetishist No, the Times They Aren't A-Changin' By Alan Ehrenhalt Thirty years ago, Bob Dylan issued a belligerent warning to the mothers and fathers of baby-boom America: "Don't criticize what you can't understand/Your sons and your daughters are beyond your command...

...He knew perfectly well when he wrote "The Times They Are A-Changin'" that he was speaking to and for his own generation, and that was what gave Dylan's lyrics their odd sort of primitive power...

...Katz believes it is foolish to be concerned about sex and violence on the Internet because they do not lead to violent behavior or irresponsible sexual activity in real life...

...he would have seemed like a confused middle-aged man seeking to curry favor with his children...

...In retrospect, most of them come off as hyperbolic fools...

...It's guns...

...But it is not an argument against establishing standards of decency and civility, and expressing those standards in the form of rules governing the things we want children to see and hear...

...Just how successful Cotton Mather may have been in his crusade against godlessness I don't know, but when it came to dancing and frivolity, he won a lot more frequently than he lost...

...It's quite true, as Jon Katz says, that whatever rules we make, quite a few teenagers will find ways to evade...

...They have an opportunity in one stroke to identify themselves with the energy and idealism of adolescence, and to establish a posture of moral superiority to their stodgy contemporaries still standing in the doorway and blocking up the hall...

...Katz is a sort of National Rifle Association in reverse: People Don't Kill People, Guns Kill People...

...American kids now have the most diverse, sophisticated and interesting culture on the planet...

...Not only that, they will cause young people to turn even more bitterly against their elders...

...If culture has nothing to do with the values of young people, what does...

...Katz not only believes it, he preaches it to the point of dogmatic absurdity...

...The new consciousness is sweeping the high schools, it is seen in smiles on the streets," Reich proclaimed in that bestseller, published in 1970...

...If parents teach morals, live moral lives, discourage and punish immoral behavior and treat their children in a moral way," he assures them, "the children are much more likely to act morally as adults...

...Few Americans would disagree, but coming from this particular author, this suggests a few practical problems...

...For a teenager to have gotten his hands on anything this dirty in the past, he would have had to take some chances...

...Dylan's version was a little more colorful: "You better start swimmin' or you'll sink like a stone...

...it's the Internet...

...He says that, despite years of research and hundreds of studies, no statistical link has ever been demonstrated...

...Still, it's hard to deny that Katz has a point here...

...He thinks concerns about the offensive nature of Internet communication are exaggerated, and attempts to regulate it futile...

...It is doomed, no more effective at stemming the great tidal waves of popular and technoculture than Cotton Mather was at banishing dancing, profanity, frivolity on the Sabbath, and general godlessness...

...It's hard to imagine a more chilling thing to say to the parent of an adolescent...

...Had Dylan been 50 when he wrote those words, they wouldn't have sounded very dramatic...

...Hardly Alan Ehrenhalt is executive editor of Governing magazine and the author of The Lost City and The United States of Ambition...

...Majorities have rights, too...

...One is the abhorrence of gratuitous violence...

...What we can do is make sure they have something to rebel against...

...As long as he can acquit the Internet, he has no interest in a serious search for other suspects...

...At the moment he makes his proclamation, Katz has spent nearly 200 pages announcing that young people are living in their own world, speaking their own language, forming their own values, and are all but impervious to adult moralizing...

...The author's reverence for free and open debate does not deter him from dismissing as an ignorant dinosaur virtually anybody who happens to disagree with him about the Internet, cyber-cul-ture, or its effect on adolescents and children...

...Bennett is a shameless self-promoter who made millions of dollars packaging useless homilies into The Book of Virtues...

...Katz dislikes Bennett so much that he can't even wait for the introduction to start unloading on him: The book's subtitle dubs Bennett a "nitwit" and a "blockhead...

...But this is perhaps the silliest statement in a book that offers quite a large supply...

...Reading Hustler on a newsstand, sneaking into an X-rated movie, hiding dirty books under the bed—all of those experiments risked embarrassment at the least and serious punishment at the worst...

...Parents who raise their children decently needn't worry about the effects of pop culture...

...He is sure beyond any measure of doubt that the daily consumption of brutality through the agency of pop culture has nothing to do with the problem of teenage violence...

...He is equally certain that kids exposed to images of promiscuous sexuality are no more likely to experiment with it than anyone else...

...There is little doubt Katz is playing to an audience that exists in significant size in cyberspace: To information libertarians all over the country, young and old, Bennett has emerged as an icon for neo-Puri-tanism...

...The first error his enemies make, in Katz's opinion, is to assume that there is a great deal of filth in cyberspace to begin with...

...The analogy has a few holes in it...

...Grasp this or pass into history...

...Bennett is not only a bully," Katz says, "but an especially cold-hearted one when it comes to children, for whom his concern is as selective as it is lucrative...

...It will be monumentally difficult to demonstrate statistically to the entire society's satisfaction that rap lyrics or violent Web sites or cyber-pornography are responsible for individual instances of violent teenage behavior...

...I don't question the numbers...

...This is a question that Katz doesn't even seem to realize he is asking...

...There is no need to be embarrassed about expressing those values, or about imposing some discipline on a medium of entertainment that mocks them...

...Another is the importance of expressing sexuality in lasting and meaningful relationships...

...Still, every generation produces its share of older people who seek out roles either as Pied Piper to the young or as voice of doom to the old, or both...

...anybody of the older generation, even the FBI or the sociologists, knows much about it, for its language and thought are so different from Consciousness II as to make it virtually an undecipherable secret code...

...Bennett was an incompetent public official whose failures as education secretary and as drug czar disqualify him as an authority on any aspect of public policy...

...But this claim is against all the evidence of common sense...

...Charles Reich at least had an air of benign optimism that made him difficult to dislike, no matter how goofy his Pied Piperism sounded...

...Maybe we could borrow a decoder from Charles Reich...

...Katz is no doubt correct that there are far more sites on the Web devoted to teaching physics than there are to promoting bestiality...

...I don't know who Katz's psychologists are—maybe he finds them in online chat rooms...

...However we might choose to talk to our children, Katz warns us in no uncertain terms that it is pointless to try to restrict them or censor their channels of communication...

...V-chips, communications-decency laws, lobbying America Online to restrict access to obscenity—all are exercises in futility...

...Adolescents like to rebel, as they did in Bob Dylan's generation and every other generation in history...

...Of course, not many parents were listening—the primary consumers of this record-album manifesto were the teenagers Dylan was encouraging to rebel...

...That's not the point...

...Or at least, people don't kill people as a result of anything they have read, watched, or discovered in the popular culture...

...That alone deterred most potential offenders...

...If you want to see a good example, pick up an old paperback copy of Charles Reich's The Greening of America...

...The eager consumer can have them for free with no need to ask an adult for them and very little risk of being caught in the act...

...Anybody determined to believe that brutal cultural images have no effect on the conduct of young people is going to believe it, and there's not going to be definitive social science to the contrary...

...But it's really only the medium that's different...

...Jon Katz has no such saving grace...

...the message has the same ominous tone to it...

...It is hard to imagine any critic of the Internet or pop culture being more self-righteous in attacking it than Katz is in defending it...

...How Reich managed to crack the code as a 42-year-old Yale law professor, he didn't bother to say...

...If we don't even understand what our children are saying, how are we supposed to get through to them...

...It's not hard to understand why Pied Piperism attracts middle-aged writers like Reich who ought to know better...

...And so Katz is right: No matter the controls society attempts to impose, American youth will, in the years to come, be watching and reading more material their parents consider offensive than young people in the past...

...This time, though, the instrument of rebellion isn't primarily music, or drugs, or politics...

...This is the opportunity that has been seized eagerly by Jon Katz, former newspaper editor and TV news producer, novelist, and current media critic for Wired...

...Few serious students of child psychology," he declares, "think culture shapes the moral sense of children...

...And Katz keeps it up for much of Virtuous Reality's 212 pages...

...They aren't going to give it up...

...We know what's killing young people," he proclaims, "and it isn't lyrics, cartoons or computers...

...For those stubborn readers who might be unimpressed by his arguments that Internet trash is both scarce and irrelevant to conduct, Katz is prepared to offer another one...

...The issue isn't quantity, it's access...

...If Bennett does half that well against rap lyrics and pornographic Web sites, he will be one successful neo-Puritan...

...Kids are moving out from under our pious control," he lectures his own parental cohort, "finding one another via the great hive that is the Net...

...On the other hand, a couple of weeks ago, wandering around the Internet at halftime of a Sunday afternoon football game, I managed in ten minutes to find Web sites or News Groups with the following titles: "Joey Loves Sheep," "B—busting Cockfights," "Best Rap Albums to Get Stoned To," "Hows and Whys of Amphetamines," and "F— the Skull of Jesus...

...That is a fact of life parents of the 21st century will have to deal with...

...The really revolutionary aspect of sex and violence on the Internet is its almost entirely private character...