Weak claims
danah boyd’s blog is subtitled “making connections where none previously existed,” but a much better title would be: “making connections where none exist.”
Recently boyd mentions a Pew study (link seems to be bad now; hope it comes back) reporting that 60% of adults are not worried about how much information is available about them online, and that 61% do not bother to limit the amount of information that can be found about them.
Here’s boyd’s “connection”:
In other words, adults (and presumably there are parents in this group) are telling teens to be careful online and restrict what information they put up there while they themselves are doing little to protect their own data.
This reminds me of adults who tell their kids never to meet strangers online under any circumstances and then proceed to use online dating sites and, rather than meet in public places, choose to go to the stranger’s private residence. Adults need to think about safety too - it’s not a story of binaries. The safe and practical approach is somewhere between abstinence and uber risky behavior.
When boyd writes, “Adults need to think about safety too,” the implication is that adults shouldn’t be hypocrites, and that adults and children are more or less in the same game regarding privacy, sharing, and safety.
But this is obviously not true. Adults are adults. Children are children. That difference drives everything, including the obvious distinction between the ways adults view their own safety and the way adults view the safety of their children.
And, it must be noted, the sermon ends with boyd saying “The safe and practical approach is somewhere between abstinence and uber risky behavior.” Gee, thanks for the platitude and the moral judgement (for instance, closing off the possibility that for whatever reason, which is not my business, an adult might exercise her freedom to perform some uber risky behavior). You know something is wrong when a critic tries to define the outside boundaries. Roland Barthes called it “neither/nor criticism” (quote: “By this I mean this mythological figure which consists in stating two opposites and balancing the one by the other so as to reject them both. (I want neither this nor that.) It is on the whole a bourgeois figure, for it relates to a modern form of liberalism” [http://www9.georgetown.edu/faculty/irvinem/theory/Barthes-Mythologies-Myth_Today-1984-2.html]).
For those of you have become bored with boyd’s untethered connections, I would advice you to remove her from your RSS subscription and add, say, Virgina Heffernan. You’ll learn more.
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