I’ve written a series on Internet malware (see the tags), during which I’ve gotten progressively more pessimistic about the state of the Internet as regards increasingly aggressive malware infections. I’m concluding that people aren’t worried enough about what their computer is up to behind their back. But now I want to spend a moment debunking at the other end of the scale — the currently received wisdom that our kids are at the mercy of Internet-based pedophiles, molesters, rapists, and kidnappers. If you have a short attention span, here’s the answer: they aren’t in any such danger, and they’re skillful enough to defend themselves from these vermin with no difficulty.
Now, part of the reason for this is that today’s younger generation, and I’m talking about kids from 10 to young adults of 25 or so, have an Internet-mediated life that is unbelievably rich and varied, and which they control and manage with considerable skill. If you’re a parent, and you email, fine, but they are light-years ahead of you. They consider email rather dull and lifeless; they text-message with their camera cell phones, they user services like Twitter to broadcast what they’re up to, they forward pictures back and forth from computer to cell phone and back, they have websites and (more importantly) FaceBook sites, they instant message with each other from a variety of devices . . . the list goes on and is actually evolving and expanding as we sit here. And you, who think email is pretty exciting, are going to be able to assess risk for them, and control the situation? Do you Tweet? Come back and see me when you do.
Are they going to be willing to give this rich social environment up because there are a few creeps out there? They are not. At the upper end of this age spectrum, these facilities help kids keep in touch when they go off to college, and then when they graduate, as they again disperse to go find jobs. These kids are keeping in touch on a daily basis, around the world, around the clock, and they love it. At the bottom end, 10 and 11-year-olds far from retreating into their computers, are richening their social environment via the Internet as we used to do, in the days of the ancients, by telephone after school. But they keep it up at their brother’s sports practices, while shopping with their parents, and even right in movies. They’re glued into multiple social contexts and they shift back and forth instantly.
And at all ages, they experiment with their “selves.” Here in meatspace, where we are only who we are, we can’t escape ourselves. But online, kids can, if they’re clever, reinvent themselves — kids make themselves older, or boys try being girls and vice-versa, or pretend to be very much cooler than they are, convince others that they’re really braniacs interested in chess . . . without having to really be that, or carry it off in real life. What’s so bad about that? Just another kind of growing up, I would say.
I think most studies have shown that kids who run off and meet unknown people they’ve come in contact with over the Internet are kids who are already engaging in risky or even self-destructive behavior in real life — the real world drives their Internet bahavior, not the other way around.
So buck up. Basically, until you are enrolled in Twitter, it’s your kids who are going to be protecting YOU online.
