: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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I’m working my way through Seth Godin’s Small is the New Big.  It’s a random collection of blog posts, commentary, and reflections by the new media guy famous for the remarkable purple cow.  I’m thinking in particular about “Guillotine or Rack?” and how it applies to the situation in many American schools right now.  Godin argues that most people in organizations are motivated by fear of the guillotine’s sudden, overwhelming violence: having your idea shot down in a meeting, getting fired, not making a sale.  But he convincingly argues that everyone in the organization also has to keep their eyes open for the rack: a long, painful death that occurs as companies and individuals doggedly pursue outdated strategies in spite of insistent and growing pressures to change.  In Godin’s words, “We don’t quake in our boots about a layoff that’s going to happen two years from now if we don’t migrate our systems before our competition does.”

Godin is talking primarily about the corporate world but I can’t help thinking that so many school organizations and individuals within schools suffer from the same short-sightedness.  We don’t implement a new program because the parents might not support it.  When deciding on a new piece of software, we ask what the five districts around us are using – not so we can find something better but so we can find something good enough, safe.  We worry over state test results that measure skills that grow less important by the day.

I’m thinking today about how I could weave this into an upcoming panel discussion on “cyber safety,” at which I intend to argue that the answer isn’t just to hide our heads in the sand by telling our kids to stay off of Facebook (which they won’t) instead of helping them to learn how to use it safely.  Yes, by “just saying no” we may be dodging that predator bullet – the All the while, the rack is stretching us and killing our kids.

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