Some of the people who participated in Learning 2.0 have voiced (or blogged) serious reservations about letting their personalities, opinions, personal details, photos, etc. get out there on the internet, through all the 2.0 applications we've been working with. One colleague whose opinion I respect has started to rethink her entire approach to blogging about her kids, both because of privacy issues and because of how it might affect them later. I'd like to offer the following analogy, which applies to all these concerns.
Chances are, if you're reading this blog, you grew up with a telephone in your house. If you're 20 years older than me, it's less than certain, but still likely. If you're 20 years younger than me, you may have grown up with cell phones. But let's consider the landline that came into your house when you were in high school.
We all used it to some extent. Talking to friends was the big one in high school, but there was also talking to family, employers, parents' employers, telemarketers, prank callers (or doing the prank calling), and, if you were very unlucky, obscene callers. ... Huh. I'd never put that together until just now - the telephone had spammers and porn both. Anyway, if you think back to high school, you might remember getting a phone call from someone you knew only peripherally from school, or from a friend of a friend, either looking for the homework assignment, or wondering if you'd like to go see a movie, or whatever. And maybe you didn't mind, or maybe it was distasteful to whatever level for you.
In any case, you put up with the bad aspects so that you could have the advantages. You didn't reject the telephone out of hand the first time you had a bad or weird experience with it. (Well, most likely ... ) You adapted, perhaps. You became more cautious. But since you were young, you rolled with it. It's what you grew up with.
So now there's this newfangled internet. You don't want to repeat mistakes you made, or your friends made, so you apply the lens of caution borne of all the experiences you had with the telephone, and everything else in your life up until now. Perhaps you're less adaptable because you're not as young. Or maybe you are just as adaptable as you've ever been ... though in that case it's likely that you have already adapted to the internet. Or maybe caution has served you well, so you're just cautious.
My grandparents didn't grow up with a telephone in their house. It may have taken longer for them, but they came around eventually.
Kids today are growing up with the internet. It's what they will know, to the extent that we expose them to it. It won't suddenly become this horrible thing we did to them.
So embrace the internet and the 2.0 applications that interest you.
Cautiously.
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2 comments:
You and I have a near-constant dialogue about how much personal filter to apply to our family blog. It's individual, it changes, and it's really, really hard to figure out. I'm glad people talk about it, and I think it's a good topic to revisit often.
As someone who grew up in the 50s and 60, it always amazed me that the youth of our country WANTS all of this personal information/feelings/thoughts out there for anyone to read. Since I have a daughter of the this geneeration, I understand this is how they keep in contact with friends (and I can actually see what she's doing, too), and am happy that she is now censoring herself, not posting all of her opinions or data. And as a genealogist, I think the openness is great, but I am generally still of a private enough person to not really want everyone to know what I am thinking.
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