Commentary: Those technological 'instruments of the devil' Barry Golson, Star Tribune Published Friday, April 11, 1997 As a new century draws nigh, a dire threat to the morals and fabric of society looms before us. Many describe this new network, by which machines residing in the very bosom of our families are linked in telegraph-like fashion, as a boon to mankind. But right-thinking Americans will see these speaking machines for what they are: Potential instruments of the devil. Witness, if you will, a few items reported so far in 1897. A once-pious child of 12 in Rochester, N.Y., whose father negligently allowed him to use a so-called telephone installed in their home, was repeatedly overheard speaking into it, using language not fit to print in this newspaper. In the law-abiding suburb of Yonkers, using a "party line" on which unrelated persons may speak at the same time, a prominent married man was heard making a rendezvous with the wife of another. At a respected firm on Wall Street, a stockbroker made a telephone connection to a client, urging that he purchase securities in a buggy whip manufacturer. The company went bankrupt several months later, and the recipient of the call is now in the poorhouse. On Manhattan's Lower East Side, political malcontents freely use the telephone network to exchange disloyal, scurrilous speculation about our government -- that a war with Spain is being plotted! In Brooklyn, a Roman Catholic man persuaded a younger, weaker-willed Methodist acquaintance to abandon his faith and join him in Papist rituals. Both men were employed by the local telephone firm! Wives, sons and daughters have been loosened from paternal ties by unrestricted use of telephones. Unscrupulous operators are linked directly into our hearths and homes. I call on President McKinley and Congress to go beyond the recent passage of the Telephone Decency Act, which the Supreme Court will assuredly confirm. I call for a federal bureaucracy by which telephone calls will be monitored by morally upstanding committees in every town and hamlet. We must stop the spread of turpitude now. If not, what next? Already, science journals speculate about "wireless" messages, of a day when images may be sent through the air. We must act now to tame this venomous network -- nay, this Net of Vipers. Yes, we must censor the Net, for the sake of generations yet to come! -- Barry Golson is editor in chief of Yahoo! Internet Life magazine. He wrote this article for the New York Times. (c) Copyright 1997 Star Tribune. All rights reserved.