Online safety in Shreveport (La.)

"Don't be intimidated by your lack of computer knowledge," is part of the sound advice police Lt. Bill Duncan tells parents in his Shreveport-area online-safety talks. He tells them to "talk to their kids" so they'll be more willing to tell them what's going on in their lives - including their online experiences," the Shreveport Times reports. One mother who attended a Duncan talk told the Times she went home and did just that, and - although her teenage daughter is "very computer savvy," some of the points made in the online-safety presentation was news to the girl, which surprised her mom. That's the funny thing about technology and human nature. We seem to assume that if someone else knows more than we do about tech, they somehow know all there is to know. This is especially not the case with the Internet. It's so vast, so many different media - from information (news, advice, advertising) to communications (email, IM, chat, discussion boards, VoIP telephony) to gaming (little games at PBS Kids and NickJr to massively multiplayer big-kid games with chat), and so on - that each person really only know the little corners of it s/he uses on a daily basis. Plus, as I learned from Dr. Herb Lin, who led a major mid-'02 study at the National Research Council on "Youth, Pornography, & the Internet", parents and kids use the Internet differently, so each has his and her own area of expertise, and it's risky to make assumptions about each other's online activities. [For more from Herb, see "Dial-up's just fine, thanks" and "Family Tech," 9/5/03.]