Yahoo Chats and Children

As someone relatively familiar with the internet, I have used Yahoo IM for the better part of 10 years. Part of that, I’ve also become very familiar with Yahoo chat as well.

Now, for those of you that might remember, Yahoo chat used to have user created rooms. They could be anything and the people that came into them were very sociable and, you’d assume, shared an interest of yours. For a long time I was very active in the roleplaying rooms with my friend from high school, Kayla. She and I through our alternate personas scandalized the roleplaying community as sort of tag team terrorists.

We never did anything mean or abusive but we were more than comfortable picking a target and making things very fun and interesting for them. The extent of our roleplaying skill, at the time, was little more than putting actions in ** and speaking outside the **. Very confusing but at the time we didn’t know any better. We blended in with the other roleplayers and did our best to have as much fun as possible.

Yahoo chat no longer has user rooms. Why, you may ask? Well, there are two reasons from what I can understand.

1. Parents have ceased to be parents. And
2. The advertisers reacted to parents not being parents.

Now, as someone who is not a parent myself, I know this may come off a bit wrong. However, I am an aunt and I believe in adult accountability for their children. Children learn bad behavior. They aren’t born into it.

Anyway, the point of the matter is that user rooms were disabled on yahoo when advertisers threatened to walk away because they didn’t want to be associated with a premise where children created “10-12 year old sex chat” and “The Rapist’s Alley” or whatever perverted thing they decided to make. I was almost 20 at the time just before they banned user rooms and in horror I’d watch some of these chats and the things kids would say. Were they real children? I don’t know. Of all the people in the chat room and their level of literacy, I tend to think at least some of them were.

What I want to know is, and I’ve said it a million times, where the hell were the parents? How is it in the computer age that parents still don’t think to monitor what their children are seeing or doing online? Have the reports of computer stalking, information sharing, etc done nothing to tell these adults that they should watch their children and keep track of activity? Doesn’t it scare them that children, small children, are trying to experience sexuality in a vicarious way?

But this hooks into my thesis about the blasé attitude of parents I expressed in my previous blog.

Day 50 - 315 Days to Go