The censor is an intrusive reader, a reader who forces his way into the intimacy of the writing transaction, forces out the figure of the loved or courted reader, reads your words in a disapproving and censorious fashion. Journalism has little interest in free-speech issues as they relate to children's rights, since they are much too absorbed in transmitting hysterical warnings about cyber addiction and Net pornography. The president of the United States and most of Congress made their sentiments clear by passing the Communications Decency Act , which would criminalize hundreds of thousands of teenagers by making it a federal crime for them to talk about their sex lives, real or imagined, online. Peacefire refutes the persistent libels of the young as stupid, disconnected, and too weak-minded to make rational judgments for themselves. It demonstrates the radical political potential of the Internet to connect people in communities, who previously had no way of communicating with one another.
Communities are more powerful than individuals.
They are sprouting up all over the Web, creating new kinds of political realities and opportunities. For the young particularly, the opportunity to come together to talk about the real moral issues they face in their lives is nothing less than miraculous. Peacefire also underscores the still-unrealized potential of the Net to transcend ignorance, repression, and dogma. To tell the truth, and pass it along, right over the heads of the very many people who always have and always will prefer to block it rather than face it. . . . . The Netizen Talk about kids' rights, blocking software, and online communities, in Threads . . . . .