Years and years ago, I remember my brother coming over and telling me about his friend’s nephew, and he said, “Here, he has pictures on Facebook and we can look them up. But you might need to register to see them.” Of course this was followed by checking out the site and questions like, “Why not just use Myspace, or Friendster?” and from there my awareness of Facebook phenomenon began. I went back a couple times to see how much cooler Facebook was than Myspace, and then signed up. Like many other people my age, we wanted to share our pictures of our kids being cute. We are the first generation of parents with easy access to social media, and our kids’ lives are timelined on our pages, from the first ultrasound to the day they finally open their own Facebook account. And they now can share, too. And to be sure, they share EVERYTHING.
Many of these children have laptops, webcams, smartphones, Androids and IPads. They have access to media for just about every waking moment of their day. They use them in school, and they play games, they text their parents, and there are apps being developed to implement smartphones into their classwork at school. There is almost nothing they don’t record with their incredible technological playthings. Many parents fear the day when they start engaging in horrors like cyberbullying or sexting. That is on my list of fears, yes. But… what about just the ease and the dependence everyone is building up? Especially, I think, for kids that never lived without it in the first place.
For example: Think of one thing you have had access to your whole life, whether it was yours or your parents. Maybe a house, phone, car, television. Imagine living without it. For good. Sure would take a lot of adjusting, and we all acknowledge that on occasion. We have “Turn of the TV Week” every spring. Many parents participate in these pseudo-events to prove to their children that they can live without it. But imagine that TV is one of your primary forms of communication. What is it that kids in their early years of technological communication do not say via some media device?
“My life sucks.” “DM me if you wanna skype. Im booooorrrred!” “My mom makes me so mad.” “Inbox me a secret you’ve never told me.” “Joe321XX is sooooo sexy!” Some parents, in an effort to have a false sense of security in the cyberworld “friend” their children, but often this becomes difficult because what kids used to say outside of parent’s earshot now is right in front of them, and they have to choose to either let it slide sometimes, or call them on every. single. little. offense. If you know your parents are watching, and they don’t make a sound, did you really break any rules?
I grew up riding a bus that was quite a warzone, for real. It was treacherous. My brother was pulled off for good when someone spit in his face, and the school and bus driver didn't do anything about it. He was in elementary school. I rode the same route years before that, and in an effort to act tough (so then these tough guys would notice me) I learned to curse like a sailor. I also learned to keep it below the radar of the adults, and to this day I have an uncanny talent for polite and charming conversation in certain circles, and potty mouth around my peers and rougher influences. This came in quite handy throughout my life. My girls think “fart” is about the dirtiest word on the planet. And it seems to me that this is fairly common adolescent behavior. But what happens when not just the 7 or 8 kids near them on the bus is witness to the learning process here, and their list of 680 kids they are “friends” with have a permanent record of it?? And they can retweet it, reread it, comment, discuss and show to people the person posting thought it was hidden from. And they don’t care. They actually like the attention. We all do. How often have you ‘vaguebooked’ a status in order to get people curious enough to write back—“OMG, What is wrong? Why the????”
Adolescents have a very hard time conceptualizing permanent, and it seems that in this new age we as a society have a harder time defining it. Update your status message. Delete it from your news feed five minutes later. How many people already read it? How many have it in their newsfeed still? How many retweets or likes or comments did you get? Go to Openbook.org and search for status messages you have posted recently. OMG!!! It’s really all there? Yup. So I’ll bet you’re going to “openbook.org/about” to figure out how to increase the security of your page and keep your page (and your child’s, if you have access to it) much more secret. But does this help you? No, it’s yet another false sense of security. Because your 800 closest friends still have access to it. You’ve just kept it out of the search engine, and deleted it from your feed. It’s still there. And then there’s “caching”, which only about 5 people in the world, aside from computer scientists, really understand. “Is the picture of me scratching my butt in science lab still there? I asked Michael to take it down, and he did. OMG. How embarrassing!”
But on the other hand, there are kids who don’t care—and many of the ones growing up online really don’t. Something about this generation doesn’t see their own vulnerability when it comes to putting their feelings and emotions online. They are saying things we NEVER would have written in front of the whole school. It’s almost as if the comments written on the bathroom wall are scribbled next to a list of all your friends, favorite quotes, future plans, cell phone number and the last 1600 pictures you were tagged in. (I remember a photo someone had of me sitting on a friend’s kitchen counter, double fisting Boon’s Farm Strawberry Daiquiri and Margarita. I was a shade under 21. Glad that didn’t show up in Google next to my resume.) That really worries us old farts. But does it worry a 17 year old? Hell no. They posed for the picture. And if they hold these beliefs for throughout their teen and college years and however many drunken nights pass before they grow up and join the real world, how hard will it be to change their minds and then erase all the pictures? It won’t happen. So we are stuck.
Unless we intervene now, when those kids are 3 and 8 and 10. How do we convince them they shouldn’t wear their hearts on their sleeves, and they are separate from their invented online identities? Is there a separation? How do we convince them the online world has real world consequences? Can we keep them from telling the whole World Wide Web every 140 character thought that comes into their head? How do we define TMI to kids growing up online? The first step is being aware, throughout their childhood, that they should grow up in the real world, and not constantly rely on mediated entertainment for everything. For Turn Off The TV Week, turn off Twitter and Facebook also. Teach them to rely on their own imaginations. Take them on a interstate road trip, to a new place, WITHOUT using a DVD player in the car. Sit on a picnic blanket and put away your own IPhone. Read a paperback book, and mark it with a bookmark. Remember how that feels? Remember when your parents read you your first chapter book like that?
Perhaps I am an old curmudgeon, sticking to the ways of generations past, and insisting these rascally kids keep their dirty laundry off the Internet. You can’t stop progress, so they say. But at least we can make the world bearable for us old curmudgeons.
