The Confusion of Tongues – part 1  

The Connection Between Personal Identity, Self Confidence, Gender and the Internet

From the moment a person has the chance to look at himself in paintings, photographs and videos, a gap is created between the way that person perceives himself and the environment. The partial control he once had when looking at his pictures becomes his representative in the world.

In our case, we want to know what happens with children from whom this (imagined) control is taken. Parents spend 15 percent of their time on the web dealing with matters related to their children, including online forum discussions, uploading pictures to Facebook and various sharing websites, and more. A child that grows up in this situation is basically a child who has been documented and published since age zero, and when he reaches the age where he discovers this disturbs him (or not), it will already be too late.

We can see the gap between the self perception of children (for example, insecure teenagers) and their posturing on social networks (sexy pictures, pictures from parties, thousands of pictures documenting what the child would previously have wanted to hide). We can only conclude that the children of today have learned, one way or another, to separate who they are from the way they are represented by themselves and by others on social media.

Is this separation appropriate for children? It is not even appropriate for adults – so what is its effect on children at an age where (as illustrated above) they are not yet able to navigate the world on their own and / or differentiate between that world and their still unformed internal world?

In contrast to adults, most children tend to present themselves on the internet using their real identifying details (age, name, occupation, school, and sometimes also addresses and phone numbers). Of course, these steps result on the one hand in strengthening the child’s identification with their internet presence, however, it also represents an increased risk.

The inconceivable availability of intermediation and transfer methods (pictures, videos, text) allows for unlimited accessibility and minimal filtering, has resulted in the phenomena of massive uploading and tagging becoming something that can no longer be ignored. From the perspective of the photography medium, this is a step upwards (or, some would say, downwards), however, it is a situation wherein the photographic medium is no longer proving itself as an experimental medium,  and is now a language unto itself, spoken all over the world (an interesting phenomenon is the picture websites, which bridge over all language barriers and create a community based on visuals alone) by children and teens. This language is more accessible than all others, and one picture accompanied by a few very basic words (where the actual mass in which the pictures are uploaded is a statement and narrative in its own right), suffices to tell the whole story.

The use of the computer and photographic language strengthens one’s ability to think in patterns and metaphors, and improves children’s visual and spatial perception, so the use of this new language need not necessarily harm their other capabilities – on the contrary.

We might have expected to see an improved, more aware style of writing today, however, in its place, we now see a new, shortened, common language, a collection of phrases and words that create a renewed lexicon typical to each “community” where, for the most part, typing is not interrupted to worry about things like phrasing, errors, editing, but rather serves as an extension to the speaking organ, as opposed to what one might have expected.
On the other hand, the anonymity of the web also facilitates outbursts of evil, repressed anger and an intention to cause malicious harm (we have already noted that there is no essential difference between the outside world and the virtual “home” with transparent walls).

This ability to find new friends and comrades, and to find support and a source of information is not only bad. The ability of the internet to raise children to a new level of development does exist, although parents must known how to support this process, in order to resume their proper role as parent. Just as parents teach their children about road safety, they should also teach them how to use the internet (not technically, but emotionally). I don’t see this new, fascinating medium only as a source of evil, as it is sometimes portrayed today. On the contrary, I see our current stage as an intermediate, inter-generational stage, which may harm an entire generation of children who lack the ability to understand their actions and what they should (perhaps) be doing.

What should website owners do? What are their responsibilities?

The Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act(COPPA(1998)) prohibits saving personal information about children under the age of 13 without the consent of their parents; among other provisions, it prohibits saving first and last names, addresses, e-mail addresses, telephone numbers and other data which can be used to find children.

In contrast to practice in Israel, the COPPA approach realizes that children can and do provide details that adults would never provide, some of which may be used for harmful purposes. Therefore, children’s websites should first identify who their target crowd is, should know how to save information properly, and should clarify unequivocally what exactly they intend to do with that information.

There is a real and (almost entirely) unimplemented need for more intelligent intermediation between children and the internet. The endless enticements of the internet can, as noted above, be dangerous to children surfing the web, and just as we have specially designed safety devices in our cars, special safety regulations for children, road rules which we all know by heart, and more – so too we also need mechanisms on the internet to enable children to enjoy all the good it has to offer, while protecting them from making mistakes that adults would have known to avoid.

Currently, children are galloping headfirst into the storm, and if you ask them about it, they won’t even understand what you’re talking about. Facebook is an extension of their lives, and as such it serves as a catalyst for processes that they would otherwise have undergone over a period of weeks and months (and during which they would have shown warning signs, or any signs at all, long before the process reached its peak). In light of all this, parents today have no excuse for being surprised and wondering “how this could have happened out of the blue ”.

The Confusion of Tongues – part 1