I still like doing my own writing, regardless of whether I can update regularly or not. To start:
The sooner children learn that electronic communications are not private, the better off they will be. Teenagers, and for that matter, many adults, seem to think that their electronic communications can remain private. Messages (and photos) on Facebook, MySpace, e-mail, iChat and cellphones are not private. They are easily retrieved, by those who are not particularly technologically savvy and by those who may not have your children’s best interests at heart. Online messages may easily be viewed by people other than the intended recipient. These messages can live forever in cyberspace. School administrators routinely scroll through messages on found and confiscated cellphones.
While the lessons mentioned here are good, their target of teenagers is unnecessarily specious. If somebody says something wrong or does something wrong online, it affects a teenager and an adult in the same way, no difference.
I tell my children that I will review their computer and cellphone communications routinely, as may school administrators, coaches, employers, potential employers, college admissions officers and law enforcement officials. If my kids don’t want me to read it, then they shouldn’t type it. If they don’t want their grandmother to see it, then they shouldn’t write it. Or, if they don’t want 46 million people to see a message, they shouldn’t post it on a Web site.
The only person who is going to know that your child wrote would be you, because you see everything they do. If you didn’t, those 46 million people could think it was their neighbor writing those messages for all they know. That’s the benefit of internet communication: pseudononymy.
There is no such thing as respecting electronic boundaries. The newspaper is filled with stories of people who went to jail because they failed to realize that electronic communications are almost impossible to erase completely. These days, the smoking gun in litigation is invariably a deleted e-mail recovered from a computer.
But your children aren’t necessarily planning on doing something illegal anytime soon, are they? And if you’re suspected of criminal behavior then “electronic boundaries” will be nonexistent because there may be evidence on your computer. Computers are just another communication method; evidence for a crime can still be collected through lots of other means.
It’s not spying. It’s raising your children to act responsibly in our electronic world. Teach children not to expect privacy on the computer or their cellphones. It’s an almost impossible task, given teenagers’ inability to foresee the long-term consequences of current actions.
Spying: to observe secretively or furtively with hostile intent; to discover or find out by observation or scrutiny; to observe (a person, place, enemy, etc.) secretively or furtively with hostile intent. Yeah, I think it matches the definition just fine. A lot of agist practices like this are done with the false intent of being proper child rearing or having their best interests at heart, but is this really how a person behaves toward another? I don’t think so.
