If you have kids, they will eventually have access to all of these tools too—and probably dozens or hundreds more. Who knows, I may be too conservative in that estimate with the way technology advances exponentially.
When I was a teenager I spent hours on the telephone. (Call waiting had just been invented so we went from one call to the next.) My parents didn’t have to pay attention to what I was doing, because at least they knew I wasn’t talking to complete strangers. Not so with the internet.
The only way to protect your children is to know what they are doing. Telephones were easy to understand. Then came e-mail, instant messaging, chat rooms and the like. Not as controllable, but still easy to understand. At the very least, you could look over your child’s shoulder and see what they were up to. (And hope that another responsible adult did the same at the school or library.)
Now we have tools like Twitter where kids can broadcast to perfect strangers what they are doing at any time of the day. They can even do it from their mobile phone. It’s no longer about control. Now you have to educate your child on how to use these tools responsibly.
To do that, you have to understand them. In many ways, this conversation with your child is even harder than “the talk.” Hey, at least we’ve been there, if you know what I mean. With social media, we may not even know what we’re talking about.
To me, that’s one more reason to Twitter.
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