I use the Net to find information and to meet people, and I find it a great place to be, spending hours a day online. I have educated myself about it, and avoid those neighborhoods where I know I won't feel comfortable. Common-sensically, I don't put my children online without being there to supervise, just as I wouldn't just drop them off at the mall for a day of roaming. As if college students had never wasted time before. As if people haven't long used classified ads or singles bars to find each other, sometimes for nefarious purposes.
People lately are willing to make the most amazing stretches of fact and reason to blame the Net.
When Pierre Salinger held a Paris press conference to announce what turned out to be a bogus TWA Flight 800 conspiracy that had been floating around online discussions for months, stories in the New York Times and Chicago Tribune painted the Internet as a conduit of unreliable information. Interestingly, the telephone companies' own Network Reliability Council has reported no recent telephone outages have resulted from Internet usage. Pacific Bell's complaint led Cerf to suggest that the companies actually might be looking to boost rates from Internet users. Our tools extend our abilities, and the abilities of bad people as well. I agree with the critique, but not with his solution.