Who’s afraid of the big bad net?

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.

The recently revealed operation by Central Scotland Police, sweeping social network sites like Bebo, Facebook and MSN, identified some alarming numbers – like 1700 men involved in 4000 sexually explicit chat logs with children over the summer, a small proportion of which led to arrests in the UK and abroad. Bebo itself has just announced what they call a “panic button” for their websites. This links directly to the Child Exploitation and Online Protection (Ceop) Centre, allowing any user, child or adult, to report their worries about online activity to child protection workers.

And it’s the predatory monsters known as other people’s children that cause almost as much popular anxiety. A report on “cyber-bullying” in England and Wales last week identified that 22% of schoolchildren had reported being harassed or intimidated via internet or mobile phone.

Yet some aspects of these stories deserve an instant reality (and history) check – mostly around the degree to which an age of networks merely amplifies existing social disorders. Weren’t there paedophile networks before the net? Haven’t pederasts always found their ways to covertly trade images, and identify spaces and places where children would be at risk (not forgetting, of course, that the family home is still the main locus for child abuse)? No doubt the police would argue that the sheer availability of material through the internet was increasing demand. But they would also have to admit that the open structures of the net make it easier to detect those with bad intent.

And as for the evil stepsisters that wreak their bullying or intimidation on the virtual village pathways ... Again, aren’t these just hyper-versions of some of the perennial dramas of childhood – the feral prank waiting for you on the other side of the schoolgates? I’d be writing in bad faith if I didn’t recognise that from my own childhood. And isn’t dealing with this part of our training for the complexities of adult society? Regulating the internet is one thing: abolishing the developmentally necessary rough-and-tumble experiences of childhood, quite another.

An eminently sensible report on e-parenting from the childhood guru Tanya Byron, Bright Sparks, deploys some useful analogies. Cyber-parenting should be like teaching our children to cross the road safely. We would hardly begin the process by chucking them immediately out into the street. Instead, we move through gradual stages of ability, through to competence, and eventually independence.

Byron says it is incumbent upon good, digital-era parents to think as carefully about how they introduce their children to the digital world as they would approach any other form of social literacy. But this also means recognising that risk-taking and boundary-challenging is a vital and necessary part of development – particularly when the neurons in the frontal cortex really start churning and complexifying, at ages 11-14.

Cyberspace will be one way to express that interior teenage chaos, as much as any missed curfew deadline or domestic fighting match. I think I understand my parental role as being the calm, reasoned, non-angry person who sets agreed boundaries, trusts my child to stick to them, and clearly responds to breaches of that trust. And I get it that this role is no less important online than off – and I’m sure you do too.

That parents have always had to “catch out” their kids when their story about themselves doesn’t quite hang together is surely something common to actual and virtual living. One of the obvious duties of modern, subtle parenthood is not just to sneak a look at your son’s diary, but at his browser history as well – and just as importantly, to be unfazed by the lurid swearing, flirting and cultural excess that’s being given off by his teenage brain, in whatever media.

So I think Professor Gould is right to exhort parents to get up to speed with their nurturing responsibilities, as it relates to digital literacy. In the late industrial age, we were wrong to park children in front of that great hypnotic pacifier known as the television set. In the information age, when adults’ work often intrudes into domestic time, it’s just as bad to let family life atomise into a series of separate interactions with laptops in wi-fied rooms.

We want to make sure that the dark undergrowth of the human condition doesn’t reach out its cyber-tendrils to do harm to our children. But I’d say it’s much more about the quality of our parental connections, than our broadband connections.

However, it’s not altogether fanciful to make a direct comparison between the intrinsic nature of the internet and a world of magical, supernatural powers. With both of my children, I’ve had to deal with the dreaded spambot – a program that finds its way into their inbox, gathers all the address book information therein, and uses that to send out varying degrees of vileness to everyone they know. A spambot is like the golem of Yiddish mythology – a material object animated by an evil spell, whose malevolent actions cannot be stopped until it’s destroyed (or deleted).

There are other deep aspects of the online world that can seem more like mythology than technology. According to social media expert Danah Boyd, we have to realise that our net activity is persistent – it will hang around forever, in some form. It’s also replicable: whatever content we put up there can be infinitely copied and multiplied, like some Cornucopian horn of plenty. And it’s “scalable”, as the geeks put it: an embarrassing message can go from privacy to world publicity in a matter of hours, a hovering Sauron in the skies of one’s reputation.

The point is to accept that the net is not a dark infernal realm, nor just ordinary-society-writ-large, but a new and wonder-filled kind of social space. The American net-guru Lawrence Lessig calls it an “innovation commons” – an open, collective structure through which many unleashed energies of human creativity are coursing. It has a dynamic, emergent magic about it – not literally, but metaphorically – which many of us would wish to somehow preserve.

But the governance of the internet faces a huge challenge. Our digital tools enable deeply civilised achievements such as Wikipedia, and support the general friendliness that mostly characterises our life in social networks. But the same tools can transmit every dark corner of the human condition to every light corner.

Do we need to change the basic operating system of the net, so that we trade some of this fecundity for some safety and security? Or should we simply be striving to build more eminently worthwhile, yet also attractive, Wikipedia-like places on the net’s open ground?

Thinking about how our children live in and grow through the web suggests to me that a mixture of the two approaches is required. I have experimented with most of the safety mechanisms that the existing net gives us – the parental controls in a browser, the non-obvious monitoring of my children’s social networks, and positive suggestions about sites or games.

For me, the third option works best of all. With both my daughters, I explicitly encouraged them to install and play CD video games like Black & White or the Sims, or latterly Spore and Civilisation. One advantage to this tactic is that they are more engaged with these often well-wrought and highly-considered virtual worlds, instead of always being out foraging on the open web.

The joy of these games often depends on the ethical nature of the decisions you are making as you move through the environment or society. The decisions might be objectionably framed (“do I destroy these villages to demonstrate my absolute power, or do I show mercy?”; “is it true that when I raise taxes in a neighborhood, crime rates go up?”). But at least I’ve had occasions for explicit and spirited discussions about these games with my kids. It’s much better than finding yourself standing outside an obscure flow of syllabic chatter, completely puzzled as to what’s being said.

I’d also say this goes for the online versions of these game-worlds, like World Of Warcraft or Eve Online at the more grown-up end of the spectrum, to more juvenile worlds like Habbo Hotel, Club Penguin or the new Facebook sensation Farmville. A game-world usually involves agreeing to a combination of common rules and rewards for successful behaviour. Those rewards can go either way (more building or more killing – for points!). But the rules are at least socially explicit, and usually pretty constant.

The pseudonymity of your chosen character, rather than the revelation of your identity, is part of the pleasure of the whole thing. You are not Scruffy Wean of Hyndland, but Thangar the Bossnificent, with fangs, mini-skirt and dayglow spikes on your back. Though there are always possibilities for inappropriate contact in any social network, I’d claim that most of the available passions in gameworlds are pouring into the play itself – roaming around absurd environments with your guild members, getting down to work building your hamlet, or getting up to mischief of variously permittable kinds, than trying to secretly arrange real-world meet-ups. (The governance of most of these online gameworlds is pretty quick to censor the behaviour of what they call “griefers”, or “vandals” to us.)

In short, the gameworld is almost implicitly a zone in which play implies ethics, or at least ethical awareness. I recently attended a conference in New York where much abuse was heaped on the way the commercial net used playfulness to suck people into their big branded platforms. All the better (said the big bad wolf of info-capitalism) to harvest people’s behaviour for marketing purposes, and perhaps other kinds of monitoring and surveillance.

The point is reasonably well-made for adults who want the rights to their own data. But with children we have (as the online protection agencies say) a “duty of care” as they grow and develop. For that reason, I’d say we should build a lot more of these big, well-managed and engaging gameworlds, rather than less of them.

The games-making genius Will Wright, responsible for SimCity, the Sims and Spore, has always claimed that he had two basic inspirations – the classic doll’s house, and the Montessori school. When Wright brings people into his gamespaces – not just children – he wants them to be attracted by the pleasure of “knowing and learning through playing” that is one of the glories of the human condition. That is, rather than by pathology or viciousness.

We need more of these positive constructions for our children in cyberspace. It’s always irritated me that conservatives (small and large C) attack the BBC or Channel 4 for meddling too much in the internet and games sector, to the detriment of “healthy market forces”. In fact, we need to update and extend the tradition of public service children’s television into new media realms.

We need a solid counter to the potential crassness and exploitations of commercial cyberspace – and it seems absurd not to use our public-service media institutions to establish that benchmark. I know of many digital advocates within our public broadcasters who feel their ambitions to create stimulating new virtual worlds for children have never been properly realised. And they fear that an axe is about to fall from a future Conservative UK government that is explicitly sceptical of the ambitions of public-sector media.

There is a long and wise tradition about the social and emotional function of fairy tales, particularly the goriest and most lurid ones. The psychologist Bruno Bettelheim said that “enchantment had its uses” for the developing child. The fairy tale was a symbolic world in which the child’s struggle to understand what adulthood might mean – all those difficulties around power, passion and purpose that we have to eventually master – could be rehearsed in a reasonably safe internal space. I think we should seek to build virtual play-spaces with the same capacious and developmental purposes for our children. It’s a grown-up job to consider all the subtleties of how these places might balance constraint and freedom, support and autonomy.

And we are adults, remember? There is one modern fairy story – involving angels and demons, maleficence and innocence, the prey and the predator – that we clearly should not fall for. Cyberspace is not the big bad wood. Cyberspace is what we consciously and wisely make it to be.

Pat Kane is author of the Play Ethic (www.theplayethic.com), and one half of Hue And Cry (www.hueandcry.co.uk). The new Hue And Cry album, Xmasday, is out on November 30