Technology Thursday
Social networking activities - weblogs, Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, LinkedIn, and many other similar services - are no longer the province of tech-savvy computer geeks, if they ever were. I was comparatively late to Facebook, but among my "friends" there are my childhood pastor's wife, an executive at Amazon, and a couple of my Aunts, not to mention the usual cadres of high school and college buddies and current friends, acquaintances, and a few work connections. In other words, a broad and diverse set of individuals all privy to my random and silly Twitter feed, which I send over to be my status messages on Facebook.
Privacy has always been a significant challenge when it comes to such services and there are various tactics and approaches to dealing with how much information is revealed and to whom.
A challenge for parents of young children (those of pre-typing age, say) is how much information to expose about them to the Internet at large. A challenge for parents of children of typing (or even mouse-clicking!) age is what to allow them to do online. There are not only safety considerations, but issues regarding what is cognitively appropriate. And, like many parenting questions, I'm sure you can find people on just about all sides of the issue.
My husband and I both 'live online' a fair bit, and so we are thinking pretty hard about what to say and reveal about our son. I kept a password-protected pregnancy blog and after he was born posted an edited version of his birth story to my public blog. My strategy for photos so far is to post many publicly for family and friends who don't have accounts on Flickr to see (I do try to post only flattering photos) and then over time I turn off public access to most of them. As he gets older, I expect I will post fewer and fewer publicly and once he has an opinion about such things I plan to involve him in the discussion. I did set up a little Twitter account for him and post updates 'from' him to that such as "I have four teeth!" or "I opened cupboards at school today!", but again, as he gets older, I expect to do less of that. We thought about creating a Facebook account for him with his actual name, but decided that we'd let him claim his own online spaces later in life.
Young people today are often advised to think carefully about what they post online, as so much of it will, presumably, be viewable years later in their lives. I think there's merit to that advice. At the same time, I suspect that as norms regarding sharing and personal revelation continue to change, the standards for what's considered inappropriate or a mark against someone will change. Nevertheless, as a parent, I don't want to completely usurp my child's own eventual autonomy and choices regarding what and how much personal revelation he wants to do. So it's a balancing act, that I expect will only become more complicated as time goes on.
I have decided not to blog about my children by name or publish photos of their faces. When I do mention them, I use the "will this embarass her when she's 15?" test. As for what to let them do online, I am at a loss. Both my 2 and 5 year old know about Youtube, although we mostly use it to watch Barney or Lego Star Wars clips together. I always worry that we'll accidentally stumble across a raunchy one... hopefully it will be a teachable moment and not a scarring experience!
Posted by: Katherine | Sunday, March 08, 2009 at 11:14 AM