hey, do you know much about DOPA? it’s the “deleting online predators act” - federal legislation from pennsylvania congressman michael fitzpatrick that would “require schools and libraries that receive federal aid ‘to protect minors from commercial social networking websites and chat rooms.” this is obviously all about targeting myspace, but in reality this proposition presents a terrifying world beyond ‘content filters’ …it aims to give schools and libraries a new type of social engineering power, abilities of brobdingnagian proportions that might turn our own kids (or your neighbor’s kids) into unwilling participants in an old ‘aol-style closed internet‘ of the future…this legislation could cut off blogs, online groups of all kinds, video and photo sharing sites and much, much more…

this is really the kind of concept that chills my shit - sites like ‘mycrimespace.com‘ go up, making it easy to understand the dangers of social networking sites - even though the crime rate is disproportionately low relative to the real world (”Less than .01% of all youth abductions nationwide are stranger abductions and as far as we know, no stranger abduction has occurred because of social network services.” - Danah Boyd) - and then shitloads of media junkets jump all over concepts like ‘15 year old girl sleeps with 19 year old she met on myspace!’ - (forgetting completely that we celebrated elvis for doing the same thing without any computers at all) …next thing you know, the government wants to step in and make it generally more difficult for kids to do much of anything online, liberating parents and educators from the oh-so-tiresome process of actively parenting and monitoring their own children/students (really, with so much great cable programming who has the time to watch those future-voters after the ritalin wears off?)

…but if you really want to get into the meat of the issue, and i mean really truly understand the dynamics behind opposition and support, with a very peter-rabbit like explanation of the technologies at hand, the social and technological trends at stake and the people touching this third-rail of the internet, then please - i implore you - take the time to read the full interview transcript available online in which henry jenkins and danah boyd were interviewed by the mit news office….

why? they explain it all - and after reading it, the whole thing will be as clear as an unmuddied lake, as clear as an azure sky of deepest summer (yes, from clockwork orange)…their credentials? “Henry Jenkins is a co-director of the MIT Comparative Media Studies program. His current research, commissioned by the MacArthur Foundation, seeks to identify the core social skills and cultural competencies young people need in order to become full participants in the cultural, political, economic and social life of the 21st century….Danah Boyd is a Ph.D. student at the University of California at Berkeley in the School of Information. Her doctoral dissertation focuses on how youth negotiate identity formation through digital publics like MySpace. Her work is part of a broader project on Kids’ Informal Learning with Digital Media, funded by the MacArthur Foundation.”

…just fucking read it, okay? if you aren’t following DOPA already, you’re gonna be hearing all about this year….

…hopefully, because the largest media and technology companies in the world are so very, very invested in a future built around online services and online interactivity, we’ll see an issue that galvanizes the politickin’ resources of the entire landscape of competitors (as in, ‘elgoog, microsoft, apple, aol, barry diller and yahoo unite in the space between diller’s front teeth‘) - plus i just can’t imagine who (beyond 700 club viewers) will be casting bedroom eyes toward fitzpatrick

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