Shepherding Our Children's Digital Identities

From a very young age, I enjoyed taking photographs. I have the boxes (and boxes) of prints and slides dating back more than 25 years to prove it. I've never been particularly extraordinary at photography (especially in the early years, my framing and composition could have used some work). In our family, now, my husband is really the photographer. His skill and patience both exceed mine substantially, and I'm now satisfied with snapping quick shots of our daughters doing their best to be the cutest two kids on the planet.

But I have a lot of photos. And I've been looking back through them over the past couple of weeks. And I am so glad to have them. I have photos that I took of my family over many years. Reliving my perspective on family events and vacations is filled with many happy memories. I found a photo of my girl scout troop taking our first trip (to see the state capital) in elementary school. I found lots of photos from summer camps. I found numerous photos of ordinary (and not-so-ordinary) middle and high school days. I found photos with friends I lost touch with (sometimes on purpose, sometimes not). I found photos of old boyfriends and boys I wished had been boyfriends. These photos make me smile as I remember the person or event (or attempt to identify the person or event). But they've also made me stop to think.

Some of these photos are kind of embarrassing. Don't get me wrong; I was (am?) pretty straight-laced, so it's not likely that anyone will ever unearth a photo of me that's really all that compromising.  But some of these photos are from middle and high school (come on, we've all been in middle school...).  I may have been acting goofy.  I may have been wearing a swim suit.  It may look like I'm wearing no pants.

(To explain: we were about to go swimming, after having taken a hike. I had a swimsuit on under my jeans. The photo is just a case of poor timing.) The above is actually a picture I pulled off of Facebook. Someone else posted the photo and tagged me in it.  (As an aside: hi, Brian. I don't mind, I deserved it, and it's really not a terrible photo.) I've done the same with photos of others. (As an aside: hi, Brian. I'm now a little bit sorry about that first photo, but it still makes me smile when I look at it.)

Back to my photos in my boxes. There's something reassuring about the control I have over them. They're mine. They're physical. And as soon as I don't want them, I can throw them in the trash. They'll be gone. Deleted.

This is not a luxury my daughters will enjoy. 

Our kids will live and grow in an exciting and interconnected world. Information of all types will be at their fingertips at a moment's whim. It's already amazing how much they take for granted the on-demand nature of content. Want to know something? Google it. Our oldest daughter will often demand that dinner conversation be better explained to her by someone pulling up a photo of whatever we're talking about... Barack Obama, new types of animals, microscopic bugs (dinner conversation at our house is interesting). Movies and television and games are all on demand. Even grandma, grandpa, or the cousins can be pulled up at any time (and at almost any place) through skype or facetime. It's incredible and enviable from all kinds of perspectives: the availability of knowledge, the evolution of computational thinking, etc.

But it's also disconcerting. That box of photos I have absolute control over? My daughters will never have that. Today, photos (mine included) live on this interconnected web, largely in social network spaces (like Facebook, instagram, and this blog), and they can't really be deleted once they're "out there." NPR recently aired an interview with Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen about their new book The New Digital Age. In the interview, Jared Cohen, who was previously a counterterrorism expert for the State Department and is now the director of Google Ideas, said:

"Whether you're in New York or Saudi Arabia or a part of Asia, educating the next generation as they're coming online young and fast is going to be important, regardless of what kind of society it is ... it's actually going to be relevant years before it's relevant to talk about the birds and the bees."

And this isn't just about photos. I'm a pack rat. So along with all of those photos I've kept, I've kept all of the notes I received from friends in middle and high school. (If you were a girl in middle and high school in the 90s like I was, you know that this is a lot of paper.) These notes include a lot of silly things. But they also include things I wouldn't say I'm all that proud of. Teenage girls, my former self included, can be mean (and brutally honest). Today, though, these notes and the verbal interactions we had are replaced more and more with interactions across social media like Facebook. Today's kids are putting their uncensored thoughts in Facebook status updates, tweets, and comments on others' updates and photos, creating a permanent record. It's a completely different world than I grew up in, and, let's face it, most of us adults haven't even yet figured out how to present ourselves in this digital world.

And it's not just about privacy and protecting your own content by censoring yourself and restricting access. Increasingly, youngsters' views of themselves are formed by and around their interactions in the digital world. And when these digital breadcrumbs (photos, texts, updates, comments, "likes," etc.) are so widely accessible by their peers and persist forever, they can have a longer-lasting impact on a kid's self-image. We have to do more to help kids create appropriate digital identities that they present to the world and to internalize these identities in a healthy way. This includes thinking about the impact of their digital interactions on others and on their future selves.

Google's Eric Schmidt once famously said:

"Every young person one day will be entitled automatically to change his or her name on reaching adulthood in order to disown youthful hijinks stored on their friends' social media sites."

While this was most assuredly tongue-in-cheek, upon reflection, it's not really all that funny.

Now (yesterday) is when we start educating our daughter (almost six) about her identity on the Internet. It's not time (yet) for her to have her own Internet presence outside of the umbrella of mine and my husband's. But she has been given a say in how her digital footprint is formed.  From now on, nothing goes on the Internet about our six year old that she doesn't "approve" of.  If she doesn't want it out there, it won't be. It's time for her to start creating and exerting ownership of her digital identity in the same way she is so wonderfully creating her actual (in-person?) identity. Since I can't realistically lock her away in a closet (and, eventually, when she has a digital device with less restricted access to the Internet, it will work in the closet, anyway), it is my job as a parent to help her learn to navigate this rich digital space she will be privileged to live in.