- Parents’ Concerns
1
Parents’ concerns over the Internet:
A cross-cultural comparison
Work on the introduction of the Internet into the domestic sphere is quite conclusive
in its concern that the traditional sense of the family unit and the household are being
eroded in unprecedented ways (e.g., Morrison & Krugman, 2001; Wartella and
Jennings, 2000). The World Wide Web with its easy, endless, customized supply of
pornographic and violent materials is constructed as the most powerful and thereby
the most morally threatening mass medium that has ever entered the home (Oravec,
2000). The additional concern that government and commercial interests employ the
Web for information-gathering purposes renders the actual walls and windows, as
well as socio-psychological boundaries of the home virtually transparent (Shapiro,
1998). Finally, the construction of children as naive and vulnerable to the lures of
mass-mediated popular culture on the one hand, and as savvy
users/viewers/consumers on the other (Calvert, 1999), serves to further undermine
traditional private-public and adult-child distinctions.
Conceived as a cultural practice, however, the sense of alarm over the erosion of
domestic boundaries can be seen as characteristically North American in its
construction of both the Internet and, significantly, the social relationships in which it
is embedded and to which it gives rise. The Internet can be seen, that is, as powerful,
invasive or subversive only to the extent that it is socially constructed as such, relative
to other, related cultural practices and ideas (Fischer, 1992; MacKenzie and Wajcman,
1999). Social discourses about globalization and progress, about privacy and
information trade, and about socialization and child-rearing practices are inherently
Page 1 of 25 
Convention