Full Circle Associates

Cool Cat Teacher Blog: What's Wrong with DOPA.

Cool Cat Teacher has one of the best, clearest and even handed analysis of the DOPA act. It is a poorly conceived piece of legislative PR. It is not good legislation nor will it help delete online predators. In fact, how DO you delete a person? Come on!

DOPA is part of the culture of fear. BEWARE BEWARE BEWARE. It totally misses the generative part of our online interactions, particularly for our youth. It says "no matter what, we don't trust you to have any judgement." How will they learn if we don't help them, work as parents and teachers to develop discernment and appropriate forms of trust?

How could we reimagine this piece of legislation not from the perspective of a culture of fear, but from a culture of love? How do we spend time with the youth in our lives, role model healthy relationships and listen and observe what is going on in their lives? What about an increase in the minimum wage so low income parents don't have to work 2 jobs to make ends meet and can spend time with their children? What about community centers that are open longer hours with mentors to cobrowse the internet to develop healthy habits? What about preventing child abuse, which is probably the single most important thing we can do to prevent adults sexually molesting children: most of them were probably abused as children.

If we change the frame about how we think of online safety, I bet we can invent better solutions than DOPA, which to me is just plain DOPEY!

ACTION:

• Send a letter to your legislators. For an easy to use applet that loads in your rep's emails, check here.
• Myspace petition.
• Blog your thoughts and tag it DOPA


• More actions on this wiki

(Updated post)


Tags: DOPA, cultureoflove, onlinefacilitation