People who know me will attest that when the occasion warrants, and alas perhaps even when it does not, I am not notably squeamish about offending people. It may surprise them, therefore, to learn that there is one place where I am actually very squeamish about giving offense if it can be avoided: in the classroom. My feeling is that I have a somewhat captive audience, and that therefore I should be as careful as I can be to discuss potentially disturbing issues — e.g. the control of pornography on the Internet — in a somewhat clinical and even euphemistic manner. We may talk about the issues, but, for example, I certainly don’t think we need in-class demos of how porn sites might trick people into going there with deceptively named URLs.
All of which is preface to why I suppose I probably won’t be playing The Internet is for porn, a funny bit of World of Warcraft machinima, to my Internet Law class next year. (Warning: contains no nudity and only one offensive image.) And probably not even to the Virtual Worlds seminar (if in fact we get it organized). Which is maybe a pity.
Now of course, I have to get the score to the original B-way show or otherwise someone is going to hear me muttering down the halls at work, “the Internet is for porn. The Internet is for porn. …” Or if I’m lucky, it’ll just be my kid’s at home who hear it.
Should’ve come with a better warning 😉