The Internet Has Come For Your Innocence

(WCBS)

Well, here we go. We came across a report in the Tucson Weekly about a story on KGUN Channel 9 that offered up this setup: "The Internet: You take one wrong turn, and you have gone from looking for a puppy to straight-up pornography involving women and men."

I'm not sure what kind of puppy the KGUN folks are looking for, but even if it's a Cocker Spaniel, that's one hell of a wrong turn. Later in the story, the Weekly reports, anchor/reporter Jennifer Waddell talked about gay men using the Internet for sexual encounters, proving her point by holding up folded papers that she said were police reports for "sex acts in public."

"Something kinky happening at construction sites, shady screenings at the airport and public promiscuity in Tucson parks," Waddell said, according to the Weekly. "X-rated photos. Men posting porn--some married, some not--trying to snag a hookup with other men. Trading photos for dirty deeds in the desert." The story prompted complaints from gay rights groups, who accused the station of stigmatizing gay men.

As I said in our discussion of the "ambush porn" story, there are plenty of things to be concerned about on the Internet. And the goings on Waddell discusses surely do happen. But consider the setup of this story – "you take one wrong turn" and suddenly you're immersed in a seedy world of public sex acts and dirty photos of "dirty deeds."

In 1995, when we didn't know much about the Internet, and movies like "The Net" were scaring us with stories about how our identities can be "DELETED," paranoid reports like this were somewhat more defensible. But at this point, anyone who actually uses the Internet knows that logging on is not a one way ticket from the world of puppies to sex in public. Unless, that is, you want it to be.

Unfortunately, people who don't much go online don't realize this. And scaremongering reports like this one only frighten them about what might be waiting when they do. It's disheartening that the media continues to demonize the Internet in order to tap into our fears about the great unknown. Like that puppy, it probably isn't going to bite.