Discussion blog

After doing the first half of this assignment I discussed what I learned with my wife. She agreed that the internet has so much to offer but we need to be careful in our home to make sure that it does not bring in unwanted material to be viewed by us or our children. As far as giving out personal information we decided that it would be best if from now on we do not give out our address, and social security unless it is with a trusted site like a job application we have checked up on to make sure we are not being scammed. We also discussed how we would help our little girl when she gets older and explain the positives and negatives with social networking and how she can be protected from internet predators. One article that we read is from the church website entitled Deny yourselves of all ungodliness by Elder Maxwell. In this talk he mentions that as members of Christ's church it is important that we stay away from all forms of ungodliness. He said that while boulders prevent the passage of any servant long trails of gravel can be equally discouraging. We discussed how the internet offers lots of good things like instant access to important information and a communication system to keep in contact with family. However there are also imposing boulders that could disrupt our life such as pornography and gravel pits such as its addictive nature that can deter us from doing what is important with our time. Unfortunately it is all to easy now a days to run across a pornographic image by accident. We placed a filtering system on our computer and have our computer placed in a high traffic area. If one of us is at home alone on the computer we keep it near the window with the blinds open. This way if we do accidentally run into something inappropriate we will be encouraged to click away as fast as possible. The gravel path that Maxwell mentions we see as the addictive nature of surfing the web. As I mentioned earlier in my first blog on internet safety I have been sucked into checking up on baseball stats. To prevent this from becoming an addiction we decided on restrictions of how much time we should be able to spend on the internet without working specifically on a school assignment. These restrictions keep me from surfing aimlessly on the internet where it would be easy to stumble upon bad material or just to stay away from idleness. I think this was helpful for our marriage and personal development.