Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Net?

Who’s afraid of the big bad net? by Pat Kane

This is an article about the internet and safety for children (and the rest of us) while using it. It uses fairy tales quite a bit to make its point, rather belaboring the metaphor, even quoting Bettelheim, so I decided to link to it as an interesting usage of fairy tales.

Here's a passage:

The question in the mind is: have you sent her off to a virtual version of the local playpark – with good facilities, chatting to friends in the sunlight, in a well-run, somewhat monitored space? Or have you left her to wander into the gloomy, unpredictable woods of cyberspace, where duplicitous wolves, terrible visions and worse lie in wait?

There is no doubt that the latter metaphor describes most of the tabloid headlines about our children’s relationship to cyberspace. If recent surveys are to be believed, more than half of UK parents think the internet is a more dangerous place for children than the real world. In other words, it has replaced the deep, dark forest – where Goldilocks, Red Riding Hood, Hansel and Gretel confronted their demons – as the locus of our most visceral fears. And even as an evangelist for the networked world, I’d be the last to minimise the issues.

Even more interesting considering my post earlier this month about Little Red Hoodie by Adrianna Kruse.