Continuing Interest in Pro Anorexia Controversy, But is Anyone Listening?

Yes, there’s a lot to be said about the National Poll on Children’s Health, which found that US parents rate internet safety as being a more serious health threat to children than school violence, sexually transmitted diseases, abuse and neglect. But the particular spin offered by the TechCrunch article focused on the “obvious hysteria demonstrated in the survey”, suggesting that articles such as our own note “Pro Anorexia on Xanga and Across the Web” were partly to blame for this hysteria and the resulting risk that “big Government” might impose “a raft of legislative rules and regulations on a future generation of Silicon Valley social networking start ups”. (The TechCrunch article neglected to mention that “Internet Safety” only comes in at number 7, after smoking, drug abuse, obesity, alcohol abuse, driving accidents, and teen pregnancy.)

But hold on a minute, Duncan Riley (the TechCrunch author)!

Sure, we’re grateful for the link back to CounsellingResource.com, but I have to ask: did you take a moment to read the article you referenced as supporting your thesis?

Yes, the article has continued to be popular, and eventually we closed the article to further comments after it had attracted nearly 100 comments from site visitors. And yes, some of those comments were fairly controversial. But did the article actually add to the media hysteria surrounding internet safety?

Um, I don’t think so…

The biggest point of the article was actually about listening to people and taking them seriously, as opposed to making up one’s mind on the basis of what we already believe… I think that point was lost somewhere along the line.

Several sites have published commentaries on the survey itself, while others have posted comments prompted by the TechCrunch article itself. One of the more sensible ones, in my view, is this one, which observes that the internet is itself neutral; it is people who commit crimes and do nasty things to one another.

To that I would add that in the terms of the original survey itself, the meaning of ‘internet safety’ was probably closer to ’safe behaviour on the internet’; and the question of whether there was actually any intent at all on the part of respondents to support the notion of “big Government” hobbling those little Silicon Valley startups was left unanswered.

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