Two great posts themed on expressing yourself online that left me with a feeling that there was some sort of connection between them.
I started reading the first on HorsePigCow earlier this morning (before being interrupted by my 3yo erupting from his bedroom). Starting with a question that utterly infuriates her, “Aren’t you afraid, as a woman, about being so open online?”, Tara Hunt writes eloquently of the (my paraphrasing) social norms and narratives written by men that compel women to react with fear as a default behaviour. Meanwhile, men presumably stride freely and fearlessly through the jungle. No-one says to Scoble or Joi Ito “Are you scared of the haters and trolls?” They say “Don’t these people ever, like, really bug you?”
Then I read an equally interesting post on Apophenia on supposed anti-stalking software that would let parents monitor children’s interractions on their mobiles. Reminding us that by a massive factor, children are most at risk from their parents, she asks why, when technology can’t solve relationship issues (e.g. the trust that needs to be built between (very) young adults and parents) we keep on building it regardless.
So what exactly it means to live your life openly – I see a lot of Tara’s life on her blog but I don’t see her home address or her kid’s school, for obvious reasons. However, I can’t guarantee that the average 10 year old has properly grasped that this would obviously be a very stupid thing to do, just as my three year has only vaguely internalised that the consequences of dashing into the middle of a busy road are very, very unpleasant. So I suppose the vague uneasiness at the back of my mind has to do with three huge reality gaps which both these posts point towards
- the Real/Imagined Danger Gap
- the Acceptable Social Behaviour Gap
- the Technology Comprehension Gap
Gap 1 is something my emotions don’t see, or rather, I understand it intellectually but the conditioning that life is dangerous is deeply embedded – and two consequences of that conditioning are described by Tara and Danah. Gap 1 is something my 3yo does understand, that 99.99% of people in the world are fundamentally benevolent towards small children. Gap 2 is my toddlers attitude towards nudity – regardless of your position on this, it’s an accepted social norm that keeping your pants on is a polite thing to do in public. He doesn’t altogether agree with this (or at any rate, he’s recognised how much fun it is to wind us up) but we’re working on it – that’s part of our responsibility as parents. Gap 3 is where most of us live and work – it’s huge, gaping and unnecessary generation gap.
Put these three together and what do you get? To adapt part of a comment I just left on apophenia, grown-ups also have a responsibility to understand social technologies and not to let their engagement with them be dictated by the media, scare stories, our own fear and the historical norm. Only then will we have a chance to realistically educate our kids how to deal with the life lived online and the consequences of the many unerasable traces left there. Or in other words, we need to be able to not only life freely and without fear but socially. That’s hard enough to do in a pre-web 2.0 world when we only had two gaps to worry about. It’s going to take commitment to work out those norms fast enough and without doing harm now we have three.
Filed under: Web 2.0, parenting, social networking, social software
What I got from the HorsePigCow post is the reminder that perceived risk is usually much higher than actual risk (Gap #1). Here in the US (and I assume it’s the same in the UK), parents are chivvied by fear into sheltering their children from any unscheduled or unsupervised social interactions. However as has been pointed out, it’s usually someone the victim knows who assaults them. Not likely to be some random creep-o at the playground.
I have to say that I think it is many times more important to raise my children to be both savvy and trusting than to monitor their every move. I think there is an appropriate level of supervision, but obsessively reviewing phone bills? That smacks of control and fear issues — not what I’d like to model for my kids.
My son is incredibly friendly: he will go up to complete strangers and tell them stories and give them hugs (given, he’s only 4 1/2). I love that about him, and I hate the thought of crushing that enthusiasm and sociability by telling him to fear strangers. The challenge is, I guess, to somehow teach/model how to take someone’s measure and how to be savvy about situations and safety. Then it won’t, in theory, matter what technology is involved, because the common sense will always be there.
And about my own online safety… Well, from what I can see, if someone had a few things in common with me (that are part of a relatively small group of people) then they could easily figure out who I am and where I live, from what I’ve written on my personal blog. But then, that person would most likely not be a complete stranger (someone I know would know them). So what’s the risk then? I’ve been working on putting up a web site for my freelance work — do I not put my home address? What’s the likelihood that someone would randomly find my rather boring web site, come to my house and do something to me? Nil, I think. And even if slightly more than nil, well, we can’t go through life with zero risk, no matter what the insurance mongers say.
Well, there are exceptions – I’m thinking of women who blog about their experiences in working to change religious fundamentalist truths of a variety of shades from a faith based perspective, for example.
True, the more “inflammatory” your blog topic, the more risk you might incur. But 99.9% of blogger are completely safe I’d say, yet we’re still taught to be fearful.