I downloaded Napster in 7th grade. I downloaded a lot of music for free. I bought a lot of CDs. I wore tshirts with my favorite bands’ logos plastered across my front chest. I spent my weekends bopping around at their concerts dreaming about an autograph. I supported my favorite artists. I never felt like I was stealing from Brandon Boyd, even if I was.
So. I got used to music for free. Kids in high school now–they download music on iTunes. They never had Napster. So they pay $.99 and the music shows up in their ipods, on the bus, in the passing periods, in the hallways streaming through their ears. The world of “free” music doesn’t exist to them like it existed to me.
I’m looking at privacy online very similarly. We live in public–now. I grew up online but I also grew up offline. I did things both ways. We had a shared land line phone and I invited my friends to my birthday by sending cards in the mail. That’s how I made an event.
But my 16 year old cousin in high school? Her life is on Facebook. It’s on her blog. It’s on her Deviant Art portfolio page. Of course, her walls are still lined with magazine pages cute boyz from Tiger Beat magazine. But instead of gabbing on the phone for hours after dance camp, she and her friends hop onto ichat for a 3-hour video session where they kind of do homework together.
They didn’t grow up thinking about privacy the way we do. But they are not bloggers or journalists or the kinds of people who get retweeted. They also don’t think about privacy online the way do, analytically. They don’t think about it in the same way that I didn’t really think terribly hard about how revolutionary it was to download music for free. They’re not really having this conversation the way we are. So, we don’t really heard as much from their perspective for the amount of weight I think it has. They’re figuring out how to live in public as they go. It’s as foreign and new as it is get your first locker or take your first SAT exam. Everything is new, everything is changing and everything is always kind of a guess in high school.
The articulate, educated, media people are discussing the open and closed social web. But the people we’re designing for, the ones barely passing their driver’s ed test are talking about the cute the new guy on Glee.
It’s going to take a generation for us old fogies (including many of the 20-somethings) to get comfortable with an open, social web. Let’s just throw those fears in the back seat with our unemployment checks and college hoodies and chill out online and off.
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3 replies on “Let go of privacy online or the newly licensed high schoolers will pass you by”
Lots of “real” people don’t worry about privacy online either; I don’t think it’s just kids. My mom spends a lot of time chatting with her theatre buddies on Facebook. She loves it, and it’s great.
That doesn’t mean there won’t ever be issues, though, just because most of the high school kids aren’t concerned. It’s totally possible to be unconcerned /but naive/.
There’s an xkcd about this, of course:
http://xkcd.com/743/
Alex, I agree with you on all accounts. Many people are not concerned with privacy (or don’t know how to be, don’t know they could be, don’t realize how public their information is being made and maybe don’t care).
I think, also, what I probably should have but didn’t write is that adults generally have a better sense of what is safe an unsafe to post online. I imagine internet safety will become a part of general home and school education. “Don’t talk to strangers at the park and on Facebook.” “Don’t use mommy’s credit card for that toy on TV OR for zappocooliesnoozerunsafewebsite.com.” There will absolutely be issues that will be solved in part by society norms, government, school systems and culture. We have all of those things now and kids still get kidnapped.
For what it’s worth, I think most social things that aren’t public don’t belong online. It sure is going to get a lot harder to do things only offline, though.
When I was growing up, my world was the neighbourhood. FOr my 16 year old the world is 8000 miles by 8000 miles. I only hope that she will make good choices and if she has to leave the pages of her book of life open on the web, she will make sure that the pages are well written and well thought out and that there is no danger of anyone reading her pages… Thanks for a very thought provoking message Nina