Watts Online

March 2  1999

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West staff
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The young and the childish

NEVER doubt that the world of computing and the Internet is a young one and thus prone to serious bouts of childishness and irresponsibility. Children, teenagers and young adults have a huge advantage over their parents and guardians in the information age.

New technology guru Nicholas Negroponte summed it up when he said: "For them (children), computing is like air; they don't notice it until it's missing. They manage without reading manuals. We used to depend on kids to program our VCRs. Now we must turn to them for help in understanding our digital future."

Federal Communications Minister Richard Alston spoke last year of the Net Generation: the six million Australians aged between two and 22. Their mastery of what to older people is still referred to as new technology "signals the absolute inevitability of digital technology in our life", he said.

However, it can be exasperating watching those experienced with computers, but inexperienced in life.

Example one -- my 10-year-old son was using the Web to find some information about the Aboriginal Dreamtime for a school project (a hard task, by the way, because search engines return dozens of commercial sites selling Dreamtime paintings before any with hard facts are looked at). I asked him how it had gone. "Not bad, but the best bit was getting on a chat line and pretending to be a 29-year-old nuclear physicist from Houston," he said. Ah well, we used to pretend to be Texas Rangers and romp around the bush on pretend horses, I guess.

Example two -- Someone, and by the nature of the content you have to assume they may not shave yet, has been posting to hundreds of Usenet newsgroups with astounding news about a revolutionary program. Their message: "Skin Reveal 0.9 beta is here. This is the only software on the Net which is capable of revealing human skin by removing the FF0cA1A2 code line in JPG images. You can scan your friend's image, and use this until you expose his (or her's) covered body parts." A Web address where the free program could be downloaded was given, but the page did not exist. In an earlier age, this person would have been flogging X-ray spectacles no doubt.

Example three -- An 11-year-old English boy has made some useful pocket money -- $27,000 to be exact -- because of his ability to handle CD-Roms and CD burners. Trouble is, his endeavours were illegal. The BBC reported last week that the boy from Sunderland was the brains behind a computer game piracy operation. He copied CDs of popular games such as Tomb Raider in the privacy of his bedroom. His parents had no idea what was going on, presuming he was just playing games and getting to know his PC. But the European Leisure Software Publishers Association smelt a rat when it was called in after bootlegged copies of top PC titles began appearing in big quantities at the boy's school in north-east England. ELSPA will not be pressing charges, despite software piracy becoming a "very huge problem" and increasingly the target of professional criminals.

The 11-year-old's operation was pretty small fry. The BBC said the average piracy bust was usually valued between $50,000 to $70,000.

The boy's father said: "He'll not be doing that again."

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