Parenting 2.0

The rise of Web 2.0 has produced numerous technological enhancements to our standard practices of communication and socialization. The old formats have been laced with features and functionality, creating a host of implications for something as simple as a quick hello. In the old days, I would meet you, you’d introduce yourself, and then we’d talk. Now, you “friend” me on a social networking site, I look at your profile, we chat online – and not only do I know more about you, I know more about your network, a network I can browse, and which links you to my own. The Pew Internet Project (PIP) states:

"...the type of 'friending' activity that occurs on social networking sites, where users link to one another’s profiles to grow their networks, highlights the radically changing notion of what it means to be acquainted with someone."

Even if we haven’t met, someone might mention your name to me in passing, and I can conduct a search for you online. A portrait painted by an algorithm. My impressions of you are thus formed by a series of images, a few news articles and snippets of text, maybe a list of books, music, and movies you like. Some of this content will have been created by others, some of it explicitly generated and managed by you to express a specific sense of identity. Depending on your self-PR skills and technical savvy, you may have created an immersive experience whose impact stretches far beyond that of a handshake, or a "Hi, nice to meet you."

But what if you’re helping to paint that picture for someone else, someone still in the midst of discovering their identity? How do you know if you are making the right choices and offering sound guidance as they shape this digital self?

The purpose of this article is to provide you, the parent, with some basic principles for navigating the wonderful world of social networking and Web 2.0 with your children - all while keeping them safe, socialized, and engaged. They are not rules, or guidelines, or a philosophy of parenting. They are just basic principles that remind you, and your kids, to think before you press that Enter key.

Now you might be asking at what point we, as parents of the digital age, should begin guiding our kids in their online decision-making? The simplest answer is yesterday. Let it be known that I'm writing these principles with a heavy dose of hindsight. After all, hindsight has been the dominant parenting principle since parents first warned children about predators in the grass. We want, we need our children to learn from our mistakes: those stupid message-board posts that still come up when you Google us; those drunken pictures we thought it would be funny to put on our profiles, once upon a time.

The following principles, by no means comprehensive, will provide you some initial understanding into the long-term implications of your family's digital actions.