:Connecting the Dots

“On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.” First published in 1993, it’s probably among the top ten most famous New Yorker cartoons.  It reveals a society just becoming aware of this new phenomenon, the Internet – and already struggling with the freedom it was granting users to obscure and misrepresent their identities.  In the fifteen years that have passed since then, the questions have only gotten bigger and more profound.  Who am I really talking to in this chatroom?  Is that really your picture on Facebook and when was it taken?  Is this e-mail really from a Nigerian prince?

We think this is a 21st-century, postmodern problem but reading Erik Larson’s The Devil in the White City and Thunderstruck has led me to reconsider.  The villains in both books – real historical figures – assume and discard aliases constantly, a practice that Larson asserts was commonplace in the 1800’s.  In a rapidly-changing society lacking social security cards, bank accounts, and even fingerprinting technology, it was easy to wake up one morning and decide, “I’ve had enough of Michael Curtin and all his problems.  I’m going to hop on a train to the next city west, change my name to Bob Smith, and start all over.”  It was a real problem that offered ne’er-do-wells opportunities at forgery, fraud, and much worse.  In the time since then we’ve erected so many laws and institutions to safeguard and fix identity from the day we’re born to the day we die.

Now here we have this whole new world, the Internet, and it seems like we’re back to square one.  The horrible story of Lori Drew and Megan Meier has to send chills up the spine of even the most zealous internet enthusiast.  Maybe, as Seth Godin argues, the time has come to abandon (or at least control) anonymity on the net.  He rightly points out that privacy and anonymity are two different things and that most of the problems on the internet stem from people hiding their identity and/or pretending to be someone else.  Maybe I’m naive, but I want the people my daughter meets online and the computer programs running the sites that she visits to know that she’s only seven years old.  And if in a few years she happens to wander into a chat room with a 50 year-old sexual predator I want her to know his name and his real age.  Would this pulling away of the masks make a horrible event more or less likely to occur?  Isn’t that why we put streetlights in dark alleyways?

If we want to do business and build real relationships online, we have to know who we’re dealing with.

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The Pew Internet and American Life Project recently released the results of a survey in which they examined how teens are using social networking sites like mySpace and Facebook. The findings may actually take some of the air out of the hysteria surrounding these sites: the least common uses were flirting (17% of respondents) and making new friends (49% of respondents) while the most common was staying in touch with “offline” friends (91%). More importantly, 66% of the group who had online profiles said that they control who has access to their information. Perhaps our students are not as naïve and unguarded as we think. Overall, the study paints a picture of older kids using technology tools to plan and communicate with known friends from the real world. The entire report can be found at:

Social Networking Sites and Teens: An Overview

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“The things you put on mySpace can come back to haunt you later in life when you are applying to college or looking for a job.” Many a school administrator, parent, teacher, and/or internet safety expert has uttered these words to groups of kids who generally receive the warning with varying levels of disinterest, fear, or shrugging shoulders.

Now, an internet startup has launched Reputation Defender, which promises to seek out and potentially erase our little lapses of judgment hanging out in the dark corners of the internet. This Wired News story examines the new site at length. What interests me is the “My Child” area, where parents can pay to have their child’s online presence monitored month-to-month. Obviously, parents want to protect their children but is it me, or is this also giving technophobic parents a way to spy on their kids? Dad can’t Google and Mom doesn’t have a Facebook account, so they pay someone else to keep an eye on their children in cyberspace. Convenient, but whatever happened to just talking to your kids?

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