Science & Tech Quote by Judy Biggert

Biggert’s line works because it smuggles a cultural pivot into the familiar cadence of a safety lecture. “Never talk to strangers” is one of those parental scripts that feels timeless, almost quaintly analog. By repeating it, she borrows its moral authority; by flipping it, she signals that the old rulebook is obsolete. The hinge phrase, “must change with technology,” frames the Internet not as a niche threat but as a force that rewrites domestic common sense.

The intent is pragmatic and policy-adjacent: make digital safety legible to people who didn’t grow up online, and justify public action (education campaigns, school programs, perhaps regulation) as an extension of traditional guardianship. She’s not arguing that “strangers” suddenly become trustworthy; she’s arguing that contact with strangers has become structurally unavoidable. Email, social networks, gaming, and later smartphones turn “stranger interaction” from an exception into the default setting. So the task isn’t abstinence, it’s literacy.

The subtext is a quiet admission of parental disorientation. Adults who once acted as gatekeepers now need new tools, because the gate has moved inside the house. There’s also a subtle broadening of responsibility: “parents and grandparents” pulls in older generations often stereotyped as digitally naive, making them stakeholders rather than bystanders.

Context matters: a late-20th/early-21st century political moment when “online predators” and cyberbullying became headline anxieties, and lawmakers learned that the quickest way to talk about the Internet was through the language of children. Biggert’s rhetorical trick is to make technological change feel like a family value, not a tech debate.