Among the many wonderful
benefits of being a head of school is being able to keep in touch with alumni
and hear what they’re pondering, whether it is something they are studying in
their college classes or an issue that has begun to concern them now that they
are out of high school. Just last week, I received a very early morning
email from a member of the Class of 2014 reflecting on her time at Bosque and
all the things she misses, but also the many amazing adventures she’s now
having in college. Her nostalgia was equally matched by her excitement,
and it was a joy to read.
Additionally last week,
a member of the Class of 2013 sent me an email with a TED Talk by Glenn Greenwald on the topic of privacy. This Bosque graduate shared his belief
that privacy is something about which we should all be concerned, but which we
do not seem to be worried about all that much. In this era of the
Internet, much of our lives and information about us are out there in cyberspace,
and we may be unaware of all the ways that this phenomenon can haunt us.
As much as this issue has affected today’s adults, the short- and
long-term consequences may be all the more profound for today’s teens who will
be tomorrow’s grownups.
There has been a fair
amount of writing on this topic, and it may seem daunting to figure out what to
read. Earlier this year, I recommended a book by danah boyd (she does not
capitalize her name) called, It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens, and I want to reaffirm that recommendation. (I also heard boyd
speak two years ago at a conference; other educators and I left her session
impressed with her research and findings.) Boyd has made her book
available through a free downloadable pdf of which she says, “I wrote this book
to reach as wide of an audience as I possibly could. This desire to get
as many people as engaged as possible drove every decision I made throughout
this process. One of the things that drew me to Yale [the publisher] was their
willingness to let me put a freely downloadable CC-licensed copy of the book
online on the day the book came out.” She continues to say, “Your
purchasing decisions [to buy the book] help me signal to the powers that be
that this book is important, that the message in the book is valuable.”
In this extremely
readable and well-researched book, boyd, who is a principal researcher at
Microsoft Research and the founder of the Data and Society Research Institute,
offers a thoughtful approach to teens’ lives online. Alissa Quart, writer
of The New York Times book review of It’s Complicated called
“Status Update,” said, “...[teens] practice a sort of interpersonal encryption when using social networks. For instance, parents might read but not fully understand teenagers’ posts and messages because they’re using in-jokes, nicknames, code words, subliminal tweeting or ‘sub-tweeting’ so tweets become ‘meaningless to clueless outsiders.’ I might find it silly if a 16-year-old from New Jersey on Facebook says she is 95 years old and from Easter Island. However, Boyd sees young people dissembling about their age or geography as the technological equivalent of writing messages with invisible ink. According to her, these personae are often modes of self-protection (from adult sexual predators, for instance) and also self-expression. ‘Rather than finding privacy by controlling access to content,’ she writes, ‘many teens are instead controlling access to meaning.’ ”
According to boyd, teens do think about privacy, but they struggle with how to balance the demands of a public persona with wanting to still guard some things about themselves from others, including the adults in their world. Whether we parents like it or not, our children are going to live some of their lives online, and as they age, we gradually and incrementally lose control over what they do there. Once our children learned to ride their bikes and then started to drive, they were no longer often in our sight; so it is with the Internet—it’s just that their world is significantly larger now. Consequently, our task as parents and as educators is to help them learn how to conduct themselves in cyberspace in a manner similar to what we expect of them in their face-to-face interactions with others.
According to boyd, teens do think about privacy, but they struggle with how to balance the demands of a public persona with wanting to still guard some things about themselves from others, including the adults in their world. Whether we parents like it or not, our children are going to live some of their lives online, and as they age, we gradually and incrementally lose control over what they do there. Once our children learned to ride their bikes and then started to drive, they were no longer often in our sight; so it is with the Internet—it’s just that their world is significantly larger now. Consequently, our task as parents and as educators is to help them learn how to conduct themselves in cyberspace in a manner similar to what we expect of them in their face-to-face interactions with others.
