Science & Tech Quote by Mark Kennedy

Kennedy’s line does a neat bit of political aikido: it praises the Internet as “a great information tool” while quietly reframing it as a civic space with adult rules. That opening clause is permission-giving, the kind of boilerplate optimism that keeps you from sounding like a technophobe. The pivot - “but we must remember” - is the real payload. It converts a household concern (kids wandering online) into a public-policy problem (kids exposed in “public”), inviting regulation, surveillance, or at least institutional guardianship to feel not intrusive but responsible.

The subtext is about consent and scale. In a backyard, a child’s mistake is local; online, it’s persistent, searchable, and copyable. By insisting that “when kids are online, they are in public,” Kennedy collapses the messy reality of private chats, closed groups, and semi-anonymous spaces into a single metaphor that lawmakers and parents immediately grasp. “Public” is doing rhetorical heavy lifting: it summons the logic of parks and sidewalks, where strangers can approach, norms are enforced, and adults are expected to intervene.

Context matters: this is the language of the early-to-mid social web era, when fears about predators, cyberbullying, and data collection were converging with a growing sense that Silicon Valley’s platforms were effectively ungoverned. The line is less about teaching kids better judgment than about legitimizing adult authority over a domain that, for many families, already feels like the house without walls.