This is my third and last post in a series about Millennials and money following El País’ event No Money this April, reflecting some of the topics that were raised. Blockchain is the database system underpinning the cryptocurrency Bitcoin, but has started to draw attention on...
Picture, picture, smile for the picture Pose with your brother, won't you be a good sister? Everyone thinks that we're perfect Please don't let them look through the curtains. In her debut single "Dollhouse" last year, Generation Z artist and idol Melaine Martinez plays a little girl’s doll who ends...
If you already know what the internet of things is, keep reading. If you want to learn what the IoT revolution has to do with net neutrality and your children's quality of life, watch this explanation from Jeremy Rifkin. Then ask yourself if the internet is really just...
Although type of content varies between older and younger users in the same cohort, we see that the mobile screen is taking over as the electronic time killer of choice, while the big screen TV will eventually reduce to a - not irrelevant, but increasingly distant -...
[caption id="attachment_2927" align="alignleft" width="240"] Image: Flickr/cc, Lotte Ch[/caption] They play iPad games during potty training. They learn computer coding before they can read. Their mothers’ smartphones become their first object of jealousy. Their sonograms are shared with the world before they see the light of day....
I keep turning back to a scenario project I did with a group of 1st graders in 2011. This was a regular class at a public school in Austin where the goal was to inspire the children to think creatively about their own future and...
If you read parenting blogs (and maybe even if you don't) you might have read the now famous Texas mother Kim Hall's letter to teenage girls. The post went viral last week and stirred controversy in as crowded parts of the blogosphere as Huffington Post and BlogHer. Apparently she lives right here in Austin, but I don't know her. Mrs. Hall reacts publicly to her sons' female friends who pose in less than demure ways on their social media. In an open letter, with a tone that alternates between what seems to be genuine matronly concern and sanctimonious passive aggression (always with the smile!), she explains to them that they will be banished from the Hall family's social media circles if they let their digital girdles fall.
So now after the dust is settled and what is said has been said, I'm offering my thoughts on why this particular post went viral. And what it says about parenting trends and social changes in the horizon.
Here are a few keywords:
Historical/ chronological myopia
Slutshaming dressed as feminism
The double standard of digital sharing
The parental panopticon
In my post Online privacy and the cyberbaby-generation I addressed what I think is a distorted narrative when online sharing habits and privacy concerns are discussed. Despite the fastest adoption of social media happening among the older cohorts, a slew of studies and articles seem to limit their focus to young people's internet habits. When grown ups distribute content, often intimate details of (unconsenting?) minors over a vast social media landscape, they are affecting another person's online reputation. Even if most parents share less incriminating content about their kids than kids share about themselves, there is something profoundly different about falling victim to other people's stupidity than to your own when regretful content is made public. If we overlook the "oversharenting" trend among our own parenting generation, we don't only fail to notice the asymmetry between the generations (children don't share content about parents as much as vice-versa, often because they are too young to join in the game), but we implicitly assume young people are less adept at protecting their online reputation.
