It is staggering and curious to me that students who were born in a time when Web 1.0 had already passed and Web 2.0 was starting to take form are strikingly unfamiliar with basic principles about privacy and the web, not to mention how the internet works.
Bane understands.
We spoke in our first class meeting about how many young internet users, despite (or because of) using the internet from a very young age, don't understand what a URL is or how to navigate to a website outside of typing the website name or search terms into a search engine. I attribute this to the user-friendliness and navigational tools that web developers have created over time that make precise knowledge of a URL an unnecessary requirement for website look-up. Why know what a hyper-text transfer protocol is when you don't need to? Just Google it, dude.
(This sassy script comes to mind, for no particular reason: http://lmgtfy.com/?q=What+does+http+mean?)
But why don't millennials understand what constitutes privacy on the internet? That anyone with a person's name and some free time (see: luxury) can find anything that a person has ever contributed to the internet, provided that the alias of contribution is in some way connected to that person's real name? I have difficulty with this question because it requires stepping into the mind of a person who was born into the internet, who has some concept of how website URLs work, how login protocols work, and what makes a piece of the internet "private." (I would have said "truly private," but in a philosophical sense, I don't think true privacy exists outside of the realm of one's own mind. When a person posts information to the internet, even in a virtual environment that "ensures" "privacy," that information is still stored in an outside location that, while protected and sometimes well so, is never 100.0% impervious to onlookers who have the know-how to gain access.) Many of us grew up with the rise of the internet and the resulting phobia of many of our protectors that there were an abundance of creepers, weirdos, goobers, whatevers, etc. on the web, ready to look us up and come to our houses and offer us good candy* and give us a ride in their sweet-o white van. Thus, our guardians were careful to instruct us to never provide our real names, phone numbers, addresses, and schedules; these bits of information were private, and we were explicitly told this. I'm not sure as to whether kids are being told the same thing by as many people at the time of this writing.
And so I think it falls on us as teachers to tell our students what constitutes private information, why that information is private, and how different websites treat information (that is, whether they make it publicly accessible by default, share that information with other companies, etc.). Some people make the distinction between "real life" and "the internet" when speaking of what is acceptable and safe practice. But for purposes like these, I don't think such a distinction is necessary, and may even be harmful, as it implies that the internet isn't a "real" medium of social interaction. It is, and the past few years have shown this. Acting as a responsible and knowledgeable citizen online is as important as acting responsibly and knowledgeably in "real life" because internet life isn't a separate realm that runs parallel to real life. It's deeply connected to our reality, for better or worse, and we need to treat it as such: as a space in which actions have real and potentially powerful consequences.
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*I postulate that there are two Kingdoms of candy: sugar candy and chocolate candy. Examples of phyla of sugar candy include lollipops, suckers, taffy, etc.; phyla of chocolate candy include candy bars, pieces (think M&Ms), pure chocolate, and the like. I'd really like to take a poll as to who prefers sugar candy over chocolate candy so that I can understand what makes these people tick. Who doesn't like chocolate candy over sugar candy? Amateurs**, that's who.
**Fun fact: "amateur" derives via French from the Latin verb amo, amare: to love. An amateur is one who does something for the love of it, as opposed to a professional, who does something for dollar, dollar bills.
Really entertaining post!
ReplyDeleteTo your point about the internet being real, I had to think about the difference between public action on the internet versus in real life. I guess obviously, real life is more direct. In publishing tweets, Rory's student had to first type out (probably in a drunken haze) his thoughts (if you can call them that) and press a button. Perhaps it felt private because he may have been typing it alone with no one to immediately react. It is sad that kids "born into the internet" don't seem... adaptive to it. They're still operating in a pre-millenial world, so it's appropriate that they have to be schooled in its uses.
I took a linguistics class so I appreciated your etymology of amateur. I wonder how it came to mean "novice"? I was thinking it could be because people who are just starting out in a field appear to love their jobs. Then, the more experienced and higher paid they become, the less the love it...
p.s. I am in the chocolate candy camp, subphyla(?): dark, sub subphyla: with nuts.
Excellent post. It really can be tricky to pull ourselves out of our own paradigm and try to understand someone's (re)action toward something when we wouldn't even consider acting that way in the first place. I don't think that I've ever started something "public" online without first considering who my audience might be. And even with that filter in mind, I'm sure if I went back through my internet history I would find something that I'm not proud of. It's a strange world we are living in; one in which we can spill our minds onto blank pages which will remain floating around space and time forever. In many ways this is pretty incredible, in others it's quite frightening and troublesome. So I agree with you, teachers who use technology regularly in their classroom should consider running through privacy issues with their students because they may have never received that info.
ReplyDeleteAlso, you'd be hard pressed to find a candy that I don't love.