I was approached today in church by one of the Stake High Councilors. He asked me to be his companion next week in one of the Moscow wards. I’m not a huge fan of speaking in any ward. Anyway, my topic is Uplifting Media. He asked if I would cover Internet and computer media specifically. I guess I have some expertise in that area but I still don’t know exactly what I want to say.
I think I want to focus on the uplifting side of it since the focus in General Conference is usually on the evils of the internet. Not that I will avoid that completely but I think a lot of people are scared of the technology and expect to be bombarded with pornography the instant they open a web browser.
An example of this is, this last week an elderly woman in the Ward called me to see if I could setup her internet and and new computer. She’s been asking me for a few weeks but things have been pretty hectic lately with the play and such. Anyway, she called and I thought I better just go and do it. So I went and got her all connected. Her first question when I was done was. “This will block all the pornography, right?” I politely told her that it would not and that you would typically buy some other software if you wanted to do that. She was mostly concerned about her teenage granddaughter. I told her to just not let her use the computer alone. I also showed her Google and let her know that they do a pretty good job of filtering results so you don’t accidentally find things you shouldn’t.
I wouldn’t mind any other ideas you might have that I might bring up.