"...Two-thirds of parents check their children’s digital footprints and nearly 40 percent follow them on Facebook and Twitter."But the Pew study suggests that this monitoring is also likely to lead to arguments between parent and child.
"What’s more, technology is at least as nimble as adolescents, and neither parents nor the technology they buy can always read a teenager’s mind. Sometimes children deactivate their Facebook accounts except at night, when they know their parents are not likely to be logging on. They roll over to new sites, often using pseudonyms. Very often they speak in code designed to stump parents.
"Danah Boyd, a senior researcher at Microsoft Research who studies American youth online, offered the example of a teenage girl who was growing increasingly frustrated with her mother’s leaving comments on everything she posted on Facebook. Once, when she was feeling particularly low, she posted the song, Always Look on the Bright Side of Life.
"Her mother took it literally, which is what the girl had wanted. Her friends, however, read it for what it was: The girl was sad, and her post was meant to be ironic."
From "Big Brother? No, It's Parents" by Somini Sengupta via www.nytimes.com
Maniacal parent-Internet monitoring makes my blood run cold. Talk about ruining family relations! How would these parents like it if someone was spying on their every thought, every private moment, who had absolute control over them? Disgusting.
Internet-spy zealots have small lives and unrelenting bitterness. They find it diverting to focus their sexual deprivation onto their offspring. They are LOOKING for something to seize upon and exploit. Instead of developing their own private lives, they ministrate to Hansel and Gretel in the cage.
And now we have the software manufacturers to turn it into mindless consumerism, as if this kind of fear and "solution" was something anyone needed.
Do you KNOW what the top mortal dangers to young people are?* None of them are the result of "texting" to friends or masturbating.
I am so glad young people subvert every new prison-guard device. Their instinct to grow up and take charge of their own lives is so strong. If you can't have a "room of your own" in your own mind, you have no mind, and no room, at all.
*More than half, car accidents. Duh. No, not from texting! From being inexpert drivers. My first fender-bender at 16, made me so mad, I had to babysit for eight months to pay it off!
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