The question of how parents and schools deal with teens using the Internet came home to me yesterday as I read this great story in USA Today about how teens are using online journaling (blog) software. It's a very positive report on how teens are benefiting from the tools. But eventually you get to the line Teens are ecstatic, hooked and hopeful about the medium. Law enforcement officials are wary.
Usually this is where I start getting annoyed that reporters have to add a 'crime caveat' to any positive story about using the Internet. Except here, the example was a 16-year-old girl in Port Washington, N.Y., who was molested last month after a man with whom she exchanged a few online messages tracked her down because she had listed her workplace on her MySpace profile. What complicates this for me was that I grew up in Port Washington and my parents still live there. So this, literally, brought home the message that there exists a real privacy concern when teens can distribute personal information about themselves to anyone who reads their blog and it must be seen as a companion to the extreme speech benefit they get when they can express their ideas to the world.
I do not think the answer is to censor our kids, or to deprive the next generation of the opportunity to benefit from this technology. But neither can we ignore the difference between a diary locked in a dresser drawer, and one accessible to the world. Education needs to be one component of the answer. And while I do not believe parents should surveil their kids, they cannot be ignorant of how their kids are using new technologies either-- the same way they might monitor TV or phone use.
AP reports that a Roman Catholic high school in New Jersey has asked its students to remove personal blogs, from the Internet in order to protect them from cyber criminals. Officials with the Diocese of Paterson cite safety and not censorship as the reason. This is not the answer. If safety really is the concern, then I hope that the high school will allow the blogging to continue, after educating the students and their parents on the privacy concerns involved and helping them make safe choices so that students can continue to learn and express their ideas using the Internet.
Education is the business schools should be in, not censorship.