Along with raising her three kids, ages 16, 13, and 7, and working a job with handicapped children and adults, the 43-year-old resident of Fullerton, Calif., also spends a big part of her life monitoring her oldest kids’ online activities: steering them away from inappropriate content, preventing them from uploading photos of themselves onto commercial sites that invite them to do so, and occasionally making them unfriend a person on Facebook whom Turner considers undesirable. When told about Mark Zuckerberg’s declared ambition to open Facebook to children under the age of 13, she sighs. “He just cares about what will profit him,” she says.
By “damage,” Wasserman doesn’t mean only the danger of meeting a predator on the Internet. She is also referring to what seems to be an almost infinite spectrum of online harm. A child could be bullied or harshly excluded from an instantly formed clique. At the same time, the pressure to be constantly posting, tweeting, and updating one’s status threatens to obstruct the development of what used to be called, in unwired times, a child’s “inner resources.” With all the frenzied social networking on sites like Facebook, our kids are often forced to be social before they have become socialized. Even for the most gregarious children, the Web’s constant reminder of majority opinion makes them fearful of trying to say or do anything that doesn’t please the crowd. Yet appealing to the Web’s masses also offers them the temptation to say things they would never ordinarily have uttered in public—things that can come back to haunt them later in life.
[...]
The process of maturing is a movement from a rich yet defensive inner space to the outer reality of pleasure postponement, setback, and perseverance. But the Internet offers one recessive chamber after another of inwardness; it is a place where distraction and immediate gratification become cognitive tools in themselves. The main barrier between parent and child, which looms gigantic in adolescence, is the stubborn insularity of a child’s world. These days that insularity has its own enabling techniques, skills, and idiom. What used to be quaintly called the generation gap is now adorned with the corporate logos of Apple, Google, and Facebook.
[...]
Dr. John Huxsahl, co-chairman of the Division of Child Psychiatry and Psychology at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., says the Internet “allows you instant access to what other people desire more than to what you desire.” Confor-mity becomes an end in itself—what Hughey calls “a new category of peer pressure.” Even Turkle’s MIT students are not immune. “They leave their phones on the seminar table” and wait for the little red light to blink, she says, “just to see who wants them.”
Of course, it is the transformation of chil-dren into desirable objects that alarms parents the most when Zuckerberg speaks of opening Facebook to the very young. “The Internet has created greater access to children,” said Cynthia Carreiro, a supervisory special agent in the FBI. Ironically, says Carreiro, it’s the very young children whose self-protective mechanisms are sharpest when they see the actual face of a predator. “Young kids are really grossed out,” she says. But on the Internet there are no physical danger signs standing between the seductive machinations of a monster and an innocent child.
Recent reports that a new flirting app, called Skout, resulted in three separate cases of children being raped by older men have driven home the dangers confronting minors when they go on the Web. After the rapes, Skout banned minors from the site, but they’ve since readmitted them, with new safeguards. Carreiro says that “parents have to educate themselves on how to protect their kids online.” At the same time, she is concerned about the rapid pace of changing technology. “It’s becoming more difficult for parents to block access,” she says.
That is, if they want to block access. According to a Consumer Reports article published last May, 7.5 million kids 12 and younger are on Facebook. Some of those kids’ parents helped their children create a fake birth date to get them access to the site. The fear of being disconnected can be even stronger for parents than for their sons and daughters. Gardner tells the story of parents who get around some summer camps’ prohibition against electronic devices by packing in with their children’s supplies teddy bears that have a cellphone or iPod sewn, prison-break style, into their tummies.
Then there are the parents who themselves become like children in the hands of the Internet. Several students have come to Hughey seeking help after walking in on a parent watching porn on the Web. They felt “shocked, betrayed, confused,” he said. Other students complained to him that their parents were so wrapped up in the Internet they didn’t come to ball games or spend time with their kids.
On several occasions, Hughey said, a divorced parent, after connecting with someone online, piled the kids into the car and drove off to start a new life with a person neither the parent nor the children had ever met. In one case, a single mother hauled her family to Texas from Wisconsin, only to get a “bad vibe” once she saw her online lover in the flesh. Returning to the hotel, she took to her laptop to check up on him and discovered that he had a criminal background. Then it was back to Wisconsin with her scared and confused children.
While parents such as these struggle with Internet addiction and disorientation, many children are actually becoming weary of their digital rounds. “Some kids complain about keeping up with the pace of the Internet,” says Huxsahl. “It’s a time of life when people are so vulnerable, so insecure, so cliquey,” he says. The jarring effect of being excluded online, or being “defriended” creates in some children a defensive aversion to the medium that is hurting them.
[...]
A da vina pe părinți pentru bolile Internetului sugerează o așteptare dezamăgit de faptul că părinții vor îndeplini rolul lor tradițional în calitate de gardieni si protectori. În unele privințe, acuzația surprinzătoare Sprowls "este un motiv pentru parinti sa preia controlul mai ferm. Și, fără îndoială, pendulului, între un internet mai reglementat și una mai neîmpiedicat de ceva timp să vină. Atunci când, în ciuda agenților de publicitate, corporații și întreprinderi on-line, FTC Renovările în cele din urmă legi anacronice care reglementează comportamentul comercial on-line, care va fi cu un pas important spre un nou echilibru între indivizi și forțele economice care guvernează Web.
Între timp, mulți părinți vor continua să se apropie de Internet într-un spirit de improvizație mișcătoare. În timp ce Miriam Ancis refuză să angajeze oricare dintre proliferante noilor tehnologii capabile să monitorizeze viața online ale copiilor sale adolescente, ea subtil desfasoara propriul avertisment chirurg-tip general, consiliere copiii ei pentru a pune o pernă între ele și laptop-ul lor. "Acesta emite radiații", ea le spune, în speranța de-așa cum părinții au sperat că-întotdeauna copiii ei vor descoperi ei înșiși ceea ce înseamnă cu adevărat.
Source: newsweek.com
Niciun comentariu:
Trimiteți un comentariu