My faithful readers are already aware that I used my time wisely on my recent trip to New England, researching excellent gift-giving ideas in the SkyMall catalog. I was not as impressed by the quality of a particular article in Delta Sky Magazine, in the November 2003 issue.
The article starts off with a list of online behaviors, most of which we could agree are bad:
Some kids think it's ok to trash someone else in a chat room or on a "blog." They think it's OK to assume fake identities, to hack into databases or other computers, to cut and paste material into their papers, to forward sexist or racist jokes, and to download music.
Then we get the real-life example that is supposed to show a teachable moment in Harper's own family. His middle-school son is instant messaging with a friend, uses the "s" word as an exclamation, the friend forwards the email to AOL and they suspend the account for violating the rules of etiquette in AOL's terms of service.
Harper sees this as somewhat embarrassing proof that he hasn't been teaching sufficient "online ethics or morals" to his children. He cautions his children:
Don't type anything online that you wouldn't want me to read. Or your mom or teachers or friends. Or AOL. Assume anything you type can be read by anyone else. If you don't want the whole world to read it, don't type it.
His son was also grounded from the computer.
What I would have expected next in this article was a segue into a discussion of more serious online problems - i.e. this wasn't a big deal, but he took it as an opportunity to discuss the entire issue of online behavior with his son. Instead, Harper walks through a gamut of "bad online behavior" (plagiarism, hacking, visiting sites that "show pornography, deny the Holocaust, or offer bomb-making instructions"), essentially equating it with an incident where his son said a bad word to someone he thought he could trust.
There's a whole lot of strange going on here.
First, if Harper thought his son had done something bad, wouldn't he have given different advice? The caution that Harper gives his son isn't an ethics and morals lesson - it's about using good judgment and covering your ass. Harper never claims that his son's swearing was wrong, but he takes the position that hacking, downloading, and visiting porn sites is wrong and then doesn't distinguish between the two.
Second, as much as I think Holocaust deniers are f*%&ers, merely visiting one of their sites isn't an immoral or unethical act. Producing one, sure. But I visited the Texas Eagle Forum's website this week and that doesn't make me Phyllis Schlafly.
It gets even more disturbing when Harper discusses blogs. After listing many positive aspects of blogs, he mentions two potential pitfalls: a) kids sometimes don't realize how much they are revealing about themselves, and b) when they publish bad things about other people it can be more serious than when they just say something to their friends. He searches for his children's names and finds his daughter's blog, which contained "a swear word that 16-year-olds sometimes use among themselves to sound grown-up."
I didn't tell Lizzie I'd read it, at least not directly. But I wasn't subtle, either. I happened to mention that bloggers sometimes forget that anyone and everyone can read what they've posted on the Web. I suggested that lots of kids cringe when they reread what they've entered, and rush back and delete it. She nodded. Next time I checked, Lizzie's blog had been zapped.
Aside from the swear word, Harper himself had described her blog as an "innocuous, mostly stream-of-consciousness diary with entries about her clothes and her moods and the boyfriend who played in a rock band." His reaction (again) wasn't that her behavior was wrong, but that it wasn't savvy - she had fallen into the first trap and revealed too much about herself.
Harper utterly fails to distinguish between behaviors that hurt other people or break the law and behaviors that just shoot yourself in the foot. He has a law degree and teaches at the Columbia U. Graduate School of Journalism, but he's telling parents that their kids shouldn't blog because it's as bad as hacking or plagiarism, and that they should punish children who haven't yet learned that "friends" can't always be trusted. To me this is more about fear of technology than anything else.
