Towards the Further Completion of My Paper

Having gone to the university library yesterday (and being further 'encouraged' to use a blog as part of research) I found some material that I think would be very helpful in my paper, assuming that I stay with the topic I have chosen.

My original desire was to write a paper centering on the dangers of the technology gap between teachers and students, and this will remain part of my paper, but I think I'm going to carry this thesis to its natural destination, which is to write about the dangers of the internet and the need to monitor what children are viewing and interacting with online.

Most of my desire to use the books I found came from looking in the table of contents to see how relevant they seemed to be to my topic. To this end, I have found the following books:



1. Web.Studies: Rewiring media studies for the digital age. Edited by David Gauntlett
This book has a few articles on pornography on the internet as well as some articles about other things on the web that might addict or otherwise be problematic for young web surfers. Overall, however, I fear that this book will be the least useful to me because it is mainly about web design and the rising use of the web as a media tool. Though this pertains to my topic, it is off centered from what I am trying to write about.

2. Children and the World Wide Web: Tool or Trap. Samuel Joshua Friedman
This book's title alone attracted me to it. I was looking for another book and saw this one one the shelf. This book has to do with what regulations have been attempted and implemented as well as it discusses some problems of internet use. It speculates on where the internet will be going and what might be problematic in the future. It has less, however, to do with internet exploitation as it does to do with how children are interacting with the web and what the differences are between previous generations and a generation of children on the web.

3. Non-Technical Strategies to Reduce Children's Exposure to Inappropriate Material on the Internet. Edited by Joah G. Iannotta.
This one's title also attracted me. This book promises to be the most relevant and helpful that I have found, short of the next book I will talk about. This book, I think, is going to focus on how teachers and parents can regulate their children's use of the internet and web resources without necessarily having to be smarter than them, or more tech-savvy than them. One of the problems that I intend to address in my paper is the idea that children can surf circles around most authority figures in their lives when it comes to the use of technology and internet. This book seems to seek to solve that problem.

4. Youth, Pornography, and the Internet. Edited by Dick Thornburgh and Herbert S. Lin.
This book, like the one I described just before, seems to center on the very topic I am trying to write about. Apparently, this book, however, focuses more specifically on pornography and children's access to it. This book centers on the struggle to keep children away from pornography while at the same time not impinging on the pornographer's right to sell his product to adults. It also discusses some of the litigation and legal issues of regulating pornography.