This is cool

[pecunium]

The world is full of wonderful curiosities. One of the marvelous things about evolution is the way things which were "meant" for one thing, morph to become something else.

The same with technology. The net was meant to make it possible researchers to get aroud the limits on computing access back in the days of mainframes¹. It has become a tool for those attempting to get information to each other, in the face of gov't opposition.

Or, in some cases, in the face of Mrs. Grundy's opposition.

The Birds and Bees Text Line, which the center started Feb. 1, directing its MySpace ads and fliers at North Carolinians ages 14 to 19, is among the latest efforts by health educators to reach teenagers through technology — sex ed on their turf.

Sex education in the classroom, say many epidemiologists and public health experts, is often ineffective or just insufficient. In many areas of the country, rates of teenage pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases remain constant or are even rising. North Carolina — where schools must teach an abstinence-only curriculum — has the country’s ninth-highest teenage pregnancy rate. Since 2003, when the state’s pregnancy rate declined to a low of 61 per 1,000 girls ages 15 to 19, the rates have slowly been climbing. In 2007, that rate rose to 63 per 1,000 girls — 19,615 pregnancies.

In the last 15 years, school officials and politicians in many states rancorously debated whether sex-ed curriculums should mention contraception. Meanwhile, public health officials became alarmed about the fallout of risky adolescent sexual behavior and grappled with how to educate teenagers beyond the classroom.

And a lot of them, in the face of vocal opposition to Sex-ed; and under the weight of gov't intrusion to local interest, have opted for non-sex ed, in the form of "abstinence only" (by which they tell girls to keep their legs together, because boys only want one thing, and if they get it you are ruined for life).

Needless to say this bit of clever use of extant tech (one which the target audience are intimately acquainted, and perfectly comfortable with) is not going over well with the "keep 'em ignorant, and they won't get into 'trouble'" crowd.

That lack of oversight is what galls Bill Brooks, president of the North Carolina Family Policy Council. “If I couldn’t control access to this information, I’d turn off the texting service,” he said. “When it comes to the Internet, parents are advised to put blockers on their computer and keep it in a central place in the home. But kids can have access to this on their cellphones when they’re away from parental influence — and it can’t be controlled.”

While some would argue that such programs augment what students learn in health class, Mr. Brooks believes that they circumvent an abstinence-until-marriage curriculum. “It doesn’t make sense to fund a program that is different than the state standards,” he said. (The State Legislature is now considering a bill permitting comprehensive sex education.)

Good luck with that. I can just see the scene.. "you are going to cancel my texts!!!!!!!!".

(I also, without sarcasm, wish them luck with getting comprehensive sex-ed).

There is no way to keep the carbonated hormones of youth from turning to sex. There is a way to keep the kids from thinking anal sex is safe (no, there isn't a risk of pregnancy, but there is one of STDs) or that AIDS is only a "Gay thing", or any of the other things the inexperienced wonder about sex.

They do wonder (I know I did. I don't really recall about what now, but I do know I wondered), and in places where the school district tells you, by implication, if nothing else, that you can't ask them; and the usual reticence of the young to ask their parents, this is a wonderful thing.

Comments

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

The net was meant to make it possible for the gov't to keep information flowing in the event of nuclear war.

Um. No. From the Wikipedia article on the origins of ARPANET:

A common semi-myth about the ARPANET states that it was designed to be resistant to nuclear attack. The Internet Society writes about the merger of technical ideas that produced the ARPANET in A Brief History of the Internet, and states in a note:

It was from the RAND study that the false rumor started claiming that the ARPANET was somehow related to building a network resistant to nuclear war. This was never true of the ARPANET, only the unrelated RAND study on secure voice considered nuclear war. However, the later work on Internetting did emphasize robustness and survivability, including the capability to withstand losses of large portions of the underlying networks.[6]

The ARPANET was designed to survive network losses, but the main reason was actually that the switching nodes and network links were not highly reliable, even without any nuclear attacks. Charles Herzfeld, ARPA director from 1965 to 1967, speaks about limited computer resources helping to spur ARPANET's creation:

The ARPANET was not started to create a Command and Control System that would survive a nuclear attack, as many now claim. To build such a system was clearly a major military need, but it was not ARPA's mission to do this; in fact, we would have been severely criticized had we tried. Rather, the ARPANET came out of our frustration that there were only a limited number of large, powerful research computers in the country, and that many research investigators who should have access to them were geographically separated from them.[7]

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

Ok, makes more sense. Not that we have a hope in hell of displacing the myth with the truth.