layout: post title: What Constitutes Inappropriate? time: "19:20"
Updating applications on my iPod today was entertaining. Apparently, Twitterific (a pretty good Twitter client) contains material inappropriate for people under 17 years of age. An application for Kijiji, on the other hand, holds no such warnings. On Twitter, I can see "naughty words" and adult topics. Or maybe it's the mindless drivel Apple is so concerned with protecting us from. Regardless, on Kijiji I can see ads for men seeking men, couples seeking couples, men seeking women and other forms of one or many possibly married people seeking the sexual companionship of one or many other possibly married people. Depending on who I follow on Twitter or who replies to my Twitter posts, this content may or may not be more appropriate than what's on Twitter.
The real issue with this is not the content itself however. The real issue comes from the fact that neither the Twitter application nor the Kijiji application actually contains any of this content. Taken on their own, the applications themselves in their binary form (which is the only way for them to be used on the iPod or iPhone) contain not one single thing that isn't appropriate to show to even very young children. What does have the possibility of being inappropriate is the various content that these applications enable access to. If we decide to use that metric however, we had best be prepared to mark the Safari application as only suitable for mature adults willing to view potentially pornographic material. Safari itself contains no such content, but it sure does enable access to lots of porn.
So at what point do we say something is "inappropriate"? Do we say something is inappropriate when it contains content that we as a society have deemed socially unacceptable? Or do we take the safer (but less practical, feasible and realistic these days) route and say that anything that even enables access to inappropriate content is itself inappropriate and label web browsers, chat clients (like MSN or Google Talk) and Internet providers as "inappropriate"?