Things you really don’t want to hear from your 10 year old son over dinner…. “What’s so bad about two girls one cup?”
Jesus kid! Where the hell did that come from? :S Apparently The Small Child was watching some YouTube videos made by some moronic 25 yr old men pretending to be teenagers, or at the very least carrying on like halfwit teenagers, who regularly make clips about computer games, technology and other ‘stuff’ under the guise of entertainment/comedy. They call themselves ‘Smosh’ and they have been making these videos since 2006, so there’s a significant back catalogue of adolescent drivel available on their YouTube channel moulding the minds of our youth. I managed to sit through less than half of the clip on the front page of the channel before deciding it was crude, coarse, common and vulgar, not to mention boring and completely lacking in any comedic engagement, with the deliberate intent of appealing to the lowest common denominator – therefore rendering it no surprise their audience is probably made up of many 10 yr old boys. It’s complete and utter puerile shite and has no right existing let alone chewing up bandwidth!
It’s bad enough that you have to watch out for the kids accessing pornography and other abhorrent phenomena (thanks Neil – that phrase is making increasingly regular appearances in my everyday vernacular!) on the internet without worrying that they’re picking up on hideously inappropriate memes while watching what should be innocuous video gaming vlogs. I can’t ban him from using the internets… that’s just not practical. We love the internets here! We don’t know how we used to live without the internets… for keeping in touch, for researching things we are interested in, for settling dinner party disputes, and just for fun and games and entertainment! With several computers in the house, smartphones and laptops, media PCs and the like, we are a family of typical technophiles and feel lost and disconnected without our daily dose of internets lovin’.
And while we all know the internets has a Dark (oh, so very dark!) Side… for me personally, that has always been ‘over there somewhere’ and mainly for ‘other people’. In the deep dark recesses of 4chan.org and somethingawful.com and rotten.com, and other places I have no desire to frequent, is a helluva lot of content that I just don’t think my 10 yr old needs to be exposed to. But what do I do about it? I can set the safe searches, I can put his PC in a communal area of the house… but where there’s a will there is a way. 🙁 And the idea that my kid is going to go searching ‘two girls one cup’ while I’m not watching simply fills me with dread. What sort of lasting impression will that special little bit of internet horror leave on a not yet formed, or informed, little mind?
And so starts a new stage in my relationship with the internets… the love/hate stage that would normally be a precursor to the divorce/banishment which simply isn’t a realistic option in this case. 🙁
We are a techophile household too and the geekling at age 1 is already obsessed with every gadget we own. I am dreading the day we reach this point ourselves, but realistically know it will happen because there is NO WAY we can ‘disconnect’ ourselves.
This is exactly where we are at. Not looking forward to it as he gets older and ever more curious. 🙁