David Schwimmer’s “Trust” Delves Into Internet Safety Issues
David Schwimmer has a strong personal motivation for taking the issue of online predators to the stage and the screen.
Schwimmer has long been a champion of women’s issues and is on the board of the Rape Foundation in Santa Monica. His interest in online predators and online safety began when he noticed an increase in cases, and became a cause when he heard a victim’s father speak at a fundraiser he attended.
The name of the play brings into focus the shifting and perilous digital landscape today’s kids are forced to navigate—one with an inherent lack of trust in terms of exactly who they are interacting with and what those interactions mean.
“We, especially kids, live in a state of distrust,” said David Schwimmer, “[by] not knowing who you’re talking to on the other end, or not know what’s going to happen to the image someone just took of you.”
Schwimmer’s play “Trust” will be showing at the Looking Glass Theater in Chicago March 14 through April 25, and will be made into a feature film of the same name, which is slated for release in 2011.
Schwimmer told Medill that he was advised early on to use his celebrity and passion for women’s issues to help raise awareness among men.
“I thought I could maybe give voice and give presence and get guys to see that it is their issue and it is their responsibility,” Schwimmer said. “I realized that these are our girlfriends, our wives, our daughters, our sisters, so it’s as much a man’s issue as it is a women’s issue.”
Read more about the play here.
Filed under: Internet Safety News
“will be made into a feature film of the same name, which is slated for release in 2011.”
I look forward to making fun of it.
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That’s fantastic. It’s really great that someone who really doesn’t have to help, does. Thanks David!
The other really frightening part of the new reality for kids — and especially girls — is the level of vulgarity they are exposed to. Ideas and words that are basically pornographic are circulated so freely — among supposed “friends” on facebook. Is anyone thinking about standards of decency on the internet? We didn’t go around publishing pornographic language in newspapers before the internet.
What’s interesting here is that the show that made David famous routinely advocated many types of pornography and helped to create the illusion that porn is a normal and an acceptable part of life. That always saddened me. Kudos to him for making a difference now, though.
It’s funny you bring that up because the show did deal with pornography in an interesting way. When Joey and Chandler started getting free cable porn, the characters were of course ecstatic, but the writers used it to show that it was warping their view of inter-gender relationships through jokes. The character made jokes about a plumber coming by and it not leading to sex, and the pizza delivery girl actually only delivered pizza. In a roundabout way saying that pornography leads to unrealistic expectations and objectifies women. Of course that was only one episode, and it did treat the matter in a flippant manner. Anyone else think “Friends” helped normalize porn?