Brain Candy

Blocked Websites and the Problem with Restrictions

If you're a teenager and you go to high school, elementary school or middle school, or any other kind of school that you're not directly paying for, you probably know that websites have blocks. In my country, it's Bess Block. It sounds like Best Block, but it's not and it's probably the worst restriction ever. All of the blocks have to be manually submitted and reviewed before they're blocked or approved to be unblocked. It's not like the program filters out certain search results or blocks contents based on parameters that have been set. For the longest time, What Would Tyler Durden Do, a very raunchy and NSFW celebrity gossip website, was unblocked until a student was caught on it. Similarly, a popular site in my school is just a hastily-slapped-together web page that walks like a research database, but is actually a ton of flash games if you take the time to scroll down.

My question to things like Bess Block is, what's the point? The idea of it is good. Guide students away from games and motivate them to get thewir work done efficiently and on time. The inherent problem with trying to block anything or restrict students, especially teenagers, is that they'll feel driven to try and get around this block. We, the teenagers, absolutely hate being told no. If you tell us not to drink or smoke or have sex, we'll try our hardest to do all of those things. If you tell us not to play games on the internet, we will. There are a hundred ways to get around the website blocks, and more are popping up all of the time.

Usually, getting work done is a priority for me. When I'm trying to find pictures for a project or research someone famous, like a philosopher or a war hero, some teacher somewhere has decided that this website is unsafe. Well, this leads me to get angry and then to play games on a site that I know isn't blocked. They wanna see an animal, then I'll shit on the floor!

This is a terrible way to go about it. If you look elsewhere, like the world of gaming, you can see the same thing happening with PC games. Developers and publishers are so worried about people stealing their product that they slap on super-strict DRM which ends up messing up gameplay for the people who bought it legitimately. Instead of trying to find a way to encourage people to buy games instead of pirate, or to do their work instead of play games, they try to grab us by the collar and sit us down and force us to do things their way.

It doesn't work. Either have a full, functional and sophisticated blocking system (or DRM) or don't have it at all. We don't like being pushed around, and the stupid attempts being made by schools and developers to stop it isn't helping at all.

EDIT: Tyler Durden is still up. Someone unblocked it. Oh Bess Block, you suck.