קטגוריה: גלישה בטוחה

Will the kids who grew up with the Net (let’s call them After Netters) become more like their elders (let’s call them Before Netters) as they take on full-time jobs, relationships, children and the other stuff of adult life? Having once craved attention, will they now shun it? Or will they continue to live their lives in public, chronicling their ups and downs in ways their elders will find befuddling and disturbing?

Today, it’s pretty obvious that having the HR guy at your prospective employer find photos of college beer bongs isn’t a good idea. But that Before Net guy running HR isn’t going to be in his job forever. Before too long he’ll give way to an After Netter with an old MySpace page of her own out there for anyone to find. Will she conclude drunken snapshots are a sign of bad judgment and hire someone else? I very much doubt it.

increasingly there’s something odd about a person who seems to leave no Google trace.

The problem is that the generation that has grown up with the Internet may have access to the world, but they still think parochially, either just about their high school or college campus. When my sister- in-law recently confronted her daughter about about some postings and photos on MySpace that might give some prospective employers the wrong idea about her, my niece was shocked and said, “but that’s private!”

At a recent panel in D.C. called: Just The Facts About Online Youth Victimization, the top researchers in the field basically debunked the stranger danger fear as being greatly exaggerated, painted a clearer picture of who is really at risk, and admitted while the fear-based approach has been working in terms of teens being more careful and using more enhanced privacy settings, it probably should be retired.

I wish I had some tips to offer on how to prevent this sort of thing from happening. The reality is that in today’s totally wired world, your digital image just isn’t your own — especially if it’s being taken by someone else (including the media). Once it’s online, this type of internet celebrity is possible whether you asked for it or not. The most you can do is just be aware that this can happen and be prepared to deal with it if it does.

A parent (בקונטיקט) has complained about wiki and even contacted the State General Attoney to see if it violates anything. Her grievances about the wiki were the following

1. there were three personal pictures – all on the map of the home page
2. some kids used their real names on pages or as a username
3. in my post on icon I identified that where I live and that I teach at a “blue collar school”
4. I had pictures of the school and the rooms which could provide a blueprint for a killer
5. some kids put personal descriptors “I am five feet tall with brown hair named Sam”

Of course, just like everything else that gets banned, the wikis went underground. More kids created their own wikis in response to this than they did while my class wiki was active. So now instead of one wiki in with the whole team involved (not to mention me), there are now many wikis splintered across the wikiverse.

Today’s teenagers are being socialised into a society complicated by shifts in the public and private. New social technologies have altered the underlying architecture of social interaction and information distribution. They are embracing this change, albeit often with the clumsy candour of an elephant in a china shop. Meanwhile, most adults are panicking. They do not understand the shifts that are taking place and, regardless, they don’t like what they’re seeing.

This leaves educators in a peculiar bind. More conservative educators view social technologies as a product of the devil, bound to do nothing but corrupt and destroy today’s youth. Utterly confused, the vast majority of educators are playing ostrich, burying their heads in the sand and hoping that the moral panics and chaos that surround the social technologies will just disappear. Slowly, a third group of educators are emerging – those who believe that it is essential to understand and embrace the new social technologies so as to guide youth through the murky waters that they present. This path is tricky because it requires educators to let go of their pre-existing assumptions about how the world works. Furthermore, as youth are far more adept at navigating the technologies through which these changes are taking place, educators must learn from their students in order to help them work through the challenges that they face.

There has been a lot of headline grabbing coverage of online predators or stranger danger and what kids and teens are doing wrong online or with cell phones — whether it’s bullying, stalking, or posting inappropriate content. There are predators out there, but the reality is most teens just ignore them or delete them like the creepy spam they are. And yes, teens make stupid choices sometimes (I’m sure we all remember a few poor choices of our own), they just have a more public forum to do it in. But the reality is that teens are using technology to do mostly benign stuff — listen to music, write on a blog (yes they’re writing!), keep in touch with old friends, make plans, connect with other teens around similar interests or causes, decorate they’re MySpace page or avatar as a way of expressing themselves.

… anonymous or pseudonymous profiles can be readily connected to real world identity. While advertisers may not collect PII (Personally Identifiable Information), they do collect IP addresses, which can be traced to an individual most of the time. Also, Carnegie Mellon professor Latanya Sweeney has demonstrated that one can identify 87 percent of the U.S. population from ZIP code, birth date and gender alone.

Most teenagers are taking steps to protect themselves online from the most obvious areas of risk. The new survey shows that many youth actively manage their personal information as they perform a balancing act between keeping some important pieces of information confined to their network of trusted friends and, at the same time participating in a new, exciting process of creating content for their profiles and making new friends. Most teens believe some information seems acceptable – even desirable – to share, while other information needs to be protected.

Are today’s teens less concerned about their privacy because the internet gives them so many opportunities to socialize and share information?

Our survey suggests that there are a wide range of views among teens about privacy and disclosure of personal information. Whether in an online or offline context, teenagers do not fall neatly into clear-cut groups when it comes to their willingness to disclose information or the ways they restrict access to the information that they do share. For most teens, decisions about privacy and disclosure depend on the nature of the encounter and their own personal circumstances. … Many, but not all, teens are aware of the risks of putting information online in a public and durable environment. Many, but certainly not all, teens make thoughtful choices about what to share in what context.

14 – 17 year olds still yearn to participate and express themselves to society at large. The difference is that in the last few years they have begun doing it online. She pointed out 4 things that make this unique:

(1) Persistence – The fact that comments, posts, social network pages don’t go away
(2) Searchability – The fact that anyone can find information about others easily. She commented that her mother would have loved to be able to easily search about her interactions, but when she was growing up this wasn’t possible.
(3) Replicability – The fact that you can easily replicate a conversation (such as IM) in many other places (such as a MySpace Page)
(4) Invisible Audiences – The fact that you don’t know who you’re talking to.

Until last month, John Bush, 52, was a physical education teacher at Landrum. According to St. Johns County School Board’s attorney, Bush was terminated after the school superintendent saw an inappropriate photograph and some text messages on Bush’s social networking Web page.

School officials conceded that the online content was not pornographic, but contained information parents would not want their children to know about their teacher.

Young people trust adults to be smart enough to realize that it is plain rude to go snooping on children’s websites without their permission. As public as their postings may be, it is ‘bad form’ and an invasion of privacy to visit a personal site that you know was not intended for your eyes.

How will young people learn to be trustworthy if no one will trust them?