The Persistence of Controlled Time

In our estimable United States, the most existing of all remaining superpowers, the phrase ‘time control’ refers to software allowing parents to command their children’s time spent on the internet, both in terms of limiting it to a certain number of hours and minutes, and of restricting it to sites not displaying material the parents consider indecent, especially if these parents don’t like profanity, drug use and sex, these being reminders of how they saddled themselves with kids in the first place. Time control, in this sense, is the product or byproduct of a few currents running through our culture today, a positive response to the desire for parents to have a State-like power of censorship within their households, a positive response to the desire for children to live active lives rather than wasting their time on this or that immobile technology, and a negative response to the possibilities that the internet opens up to predatory pedophiles. This last keeps it from being completely analogous to the V-chip, the Rupert Murdoch-endorsed home censorship TV kit available in every new TV. It also makes the issue somewhat more complicated.

The V-chip is easy to hate because it rests on the premise that the only way in which TV is capable of damaging a child is by exposing it to depictions of unsavory, illegal, or even natural but discomforting (i.e. frankly sexual) behavior, which assumes that TV itself is naturally good and all that need be done is to make keep the neutral medium focused on whatever’s considered acceptable by the people programming the chip. So, for example, a show like Bill O’Reilly’s or any network sitcom will almost always make it through, but something that might expand the viewing mind like The Pillow Book will get blocked as a sacrifice to Puritan prudishness.

Somewhere along the line, ‘appropriate for children’ got taken as meaning ‘so dumbed down there’s no hope they’ll ever grow on it,’ which I think is ridiculous. I can see (not really) why a parent would want to ‘protect’ a child from the innocuous reality of sex in the hopes of creating a repressed deviant, and I suppose it’s fine to believe that ignorance about sex will somehow contribute to his moral fiber. What I can’t see is why so much of the developments designed towards ‘protecting’ children just work to seal them hermetically from all the richness of life (here not represented simply by sex but rather by the fact that much of the richest art out there has unsavory elements that wouldn’t make it past a V-chip or internet nanny).

It’s bad enough that the template of the baby-boomers is out there to be followed by future generations, but the baby-boomers had the benefit of an incredible exposure to education and all sorts of difficult abstractions; a generation that follows this template and that has had all sorts of rich art and intellectual difficulties hidden from them will absolutely fuck the world.

However, this Time Control bit isn’t exactly analogous to the V-chip, because there be monsters in the world of the internet. While, like TV, the majority of what you can find on the internet will actually make you dumber for having wasted your time on it and the few gems are difficult to find, the internet also provides real connections to real people, however much we would like to pretend it doesn’t. If you have a conversation with a character on a TV screen, nothing you say will actually penetrate or hurt you in any way (not that there’s much to hurt if you’re talking to a character from a TV show); but what you say to somebody on the internet can hurt you, and even a mean bastard like me doesn’t believe that a child should get raped or murdered because naïveté in this case happens to be presented to one of the people who prey on it and hide behind the sterile anonymity the internet provides. So there might be something to this kind of Time Control, and since there are fewer rewarding internet experiences featuring prominent nudity, violence, and profanity than there are in film and other art forms, it may be worth the censorship.

Except, of course, in that people who have sex completely hidden from them as the abject and filthy ‘other’ will end up more unhappy and brutally repressed than those who are exposed to it as something healthy, and that a bowdlerized exposure to culture in a young brain might leave it incapable of coping with that culture when the naughty bits creep back in. There’s nothing noble or wholesome about manufacturing people who aren’t whole and, therefore, aren’t really people in this multi-dimensional world of ours.

So I’d recommend actually parenting your children rather than relying on software. It allows for that impossibly Utopian result where your son isn’t raped but also isn’t turned into a cretinous pod who hates himself for masturbating into his mother’s bras in the bathroom, thinking about his pubescent cousin.