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Wednesday, 10 October 2012

Lee Siegel on the Perils of Parenting in the Digital Age - Newsweek and The Daily Beast

Lee Siegel on the Perils of Parenting in the Digital Age - Newsweek and The Daily Beast
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RAYLOKE said...

In fact, Facebook, which hit a billion users last week, has sent a 20-page letter to the FTC imploring the agency to reconsider its planned revision of the 1998 act, which would prohibit the collection of information from children online, a lucrative practice that the social-networking behemoth clearly would not like to give up. Yet the FTC, though sharply criticized by an advertising industry unhappy with the proposed changes, says that current laws meant to shield children on the Internet have fallen way behind advancing technology. Entities, ranging from large corporations to obscure apps to roving data collectors, gather up children’s personal information, photographs, and even their physical location. Antiquated laws requiring parental permission for such things are easily circumvented by cookies that document children’s online movements the way birds devoured the crumbs of bread that Hansel and Gretel hoped would guide them back home.
For besieged parents, the FTC’s proposed revisions cannot arrive a moment too soon. But welcome as those changes will be, they will have little effect on the Internet’s social environment, which in many ways has made being a modern American parent more complex than ever before. “It used to be the proverbial question: ‘It’s 10 o’clock, do you know where your children are?’” says Jamie Wasserman, a child therapist with a practice in Manhattan. “Now your kid can be sitting a few feet away from you in the living room with a laptop, being damaged.”
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.

10 October 2012 at 17:18

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