The dark side of cyberspace: Internet content regulation and child protection

Convergence

Volumn 5, Issue 4, 1999, Pages 42-62

  Oswell, David ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 10044277390     PISSN: 13548565     EISSN: 17487382     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/135485659900500404     Document Type: Article

References (51)

1. I borrow this phrase from Kimberly Young, Caught in the Net: How to Recognise the Signs of Internet Addiction and a Winning Strategy for Recovery, (New York, John Wiley & Sons 1998)
2. However, the phrase is used widely in discussion of internet content regulation. For example, the Benton Communications Policy Mailing List notes, under the heading of 'Police warn parents of the Web's dark side', that the Sheriff of Loudoun County, Virginia, USA, has started on-line internet safety classes for parents and children (Benton Communication-Related Headlines). Available at: http://www.benton.org/news/extra/ (1 June 1999). Similarly, C. Skelton uses the phrase in the title of his discussion of race-hate material on the internet. C. Skelton, 'Network of Hate: the Dark Side of Cyberspace', id Magazine, 3, no. 2 (1994), pp. 9-12
3. These results were from a search using Excite on 30 April 1999
4. The phrase is from Nikolas Rose. See Nikolas Rose, 'Government, authority and expertise in advanced liberalism', Economy and Society, 22, no. 3 (1993), pp. 283-299
5. High-Level Expert Group, Employment and Social Affairs, Building the European Information Society for Us All (Brussels: European Commission, 1997), pp. 14-15
6. The Guardian, 16 April 1994, p. 15
7. Commission of the European Communities, Illegal and Harmful Content on the Internet (Brussels: COM(96)487, October 1996), p. 4 and p. 11
8. Andrew Barry, 'The European Community and European government: harmonization, mobility and space'. Economy and Society, 22, no. 3 (1993), pp. 314-326
9. See also, Andrew Barry, 'The European network', New Formations, 26 (1996), pp. 26-37
10. Jacques Donzelot, The Policing of Families (London: Macmillan, 1979)
11. Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality, Vol. 1 (London: Allen Lane, 1978)
12. and 'Governmentality', Ideology and Consciousness, 6 (1979), pp. 5-21
13. Nikolas Rose, Governing the Soul: The Shaping of the Private Self (London: Routledge, 1989)
14. and Valerie Walkerdine and Helen Lucey, Democracy in the Kitchen: Regulating Mothers and Socialising Daughters (London: Virago, 1989)
15. Commission of the European Communities, Green Paper on the Protection of Minors and Human Dignity in Audiovisual and Information Services (Brussels: COM(96) 483, October 1996), p. 22. The principle of 'proportionality' is a central resource in European advanced liberal governmental thinking
16. Commission of the European Communities, Green Paper on the Convergence of the Telecommunications, Media and Information Technology Sectors and the Implications for Regulation: Towards and Information Society Approach (Brussels: COM(97)623, 3 December 1997), p. 30
17. See Svein S. Anderson and Kjell A. Eliason (eds.), Making Policy in Europe: The Europeification of National Policy-Making (London: Sage, 1993)
18. and Simon J. Bulmer, 'The governance of the European Union: a new institutionalist approach', Journal of Public Policy, 13, no. 4 (1994), pp. 351-380
19. Paul Hirst and Grahame Thompson, Globalisation in Question: The International Economy and the Possibilities of Governance (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996), p. 184
20. I discuss this in more detail in David Oswell, 'The place of "childhood" in Internet content regulation: a case study of policy in the UK', International Journal of Cultural Studies, 1, no. 2, 1998, pp. 271-291
21. With regard to the discussion of the mobilisation of 'interests' see Michel Callon and John Law, 'On interests and their transformation: enrolment and counter enrolment', Social Studies of Science, 12 (1982), pp. 615-625
22. Barry Hindess, '"Interests" in political analysis' in Power, Action and Belief: A New Sociology of Knowledge?, ed. John Law (London: Routledge, 1986), pp. 112-131
23. and Steve Woolgar, 'Interests and explanations in the social study of science', Social Studies of Science, 11 (1981), pp. 365-94
24. Yaman Akdeniz, 'Who watches the watchmen: Internet content rating systems and privatised censorship', Cyber-Rights and Cyber-Liberties (UK). At 〈http://www.leeds.ac.uk/law/pgs/yaman/watchmen.htm〉 (November 1997)
25. Given the size of the IWF, there has been a problem with marketing itself as an internet monitoring body for fear that too many reports might be forthcoming from the public
26. See Ingrid Standen, '"Porning" Privacy in Cyberspace', paper presented to CRICT (London: Brunel University, London, 1996)
27. and Christina Murroni and Nick Irvine, Access Matters (London: IPPR, 1998)
28. Commission of the European Communities, Green Paper on Convergence, p. 30, my italics
29. See, for example, Jill Hills and Maria Michails, 'Is convergence a purely European obsession?', Paper presented to the CCIS/Euricom Colloquium on The Political Economy of Convergence (London: University of Westminster, September 1999)
30. See Julian Wood, 'Repeatable pleasures: notes on young people's use of video' in Reading Audiences: Young People and the Media, ed. David Buckingham (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993), pp. 184-201
31. and David Buckingham, Moving Images: Understanding Children's Emotional Responses to Television (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996)
32. Paul Resnick and James Miller, PICS: Internet Access Without Controls, available at 〈http://www.w3.org〉 (1996)
33. See David Oswell, 'And what might our children become?'. Screen, 40, no. 1 (1999), pp. 66-87
34. Young, Caught in the Net, flysheet
35. Geoffrey Hurd argues, in a study of the British television series The Sweeny, that the oppositions between authority/bureaucracy and intuition/technology are central to the structural characteristics of the television police series. Geoffrey Hurd, 'The television presentation of the police' in Popular Television and Film, ed. Tony Bennett et al (London: Open University Press, 1981), pp. 53-70
36. The notion of the 'cybercop' appears more readily in discussions of encryption than of content regulation. See Puay Tang, 'Multimedia information products and services: a need for "cybercops"?' in The Governance of Cyberspace, ed. Brian Loader (London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 190-208
37. Although it is not possible to make the argument here, I am not suggesting that these hybrids are necessarily new, but that they become clearly visible in relation to problems raised by the internet
38. Although it has not been argued that the internet is the cause of changes in the geography of domestic supervision
39. Jon Courtenay Grimwood, 'Net results', The Guardian, 1 April 1998, p. 9
40. Sonia Livingstone, 'Children's bedroom culture', paper presented to the Second World Summit on Television for Children, London, UK, March 1998
41. and Sonia Livingstone and Moira Bovill, Young People, New Media (London: London School of Economics and Political Science, 1999)
42. Hilde Himmelweit and her colleagues at the London School of Economics conducted the first major research on children and television in the UK, published as Himmelweit et al, Television and the Child: An Empirical Study into the Effects of Television on the Young (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958)
43. Sonia Livingstone and Moira Bovill, Young People, New Media: Summary (London: London School of Economics and Political Science, 1999), p. 5
44. The Express, 19 March 1999, p. 5
45. That the press reporting of the Livingstone and Bovill report was concerned with the governance of young people is without doubt. The Independent, for example, argued that the Labour cabinet should read the report and spend time discussing its policy implications (The Independent, 19 March 1999)
46. See David Oswell, 'And what might our children become?'
47. Livingstone and Bovill, Young People, New Media: Summary, p. 38
48. Buckingham, Moving Images, p. 298
49. Bruno Latour, 'Thought experiments in social science: from the social contract to the virtual society', First Virtual Society? Annual Public Lecture (London: Brunel University, April 1998), p. 6
50. See Paul Virilio, The Vision Machine (London: British Film Institute, 1994)
51. Bruno Latour, 'Drawing things together' in Representation in Scientific Practice, eds. Michael Lynch and Steve Woolgar (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1990), p. 28