Tag: digital life

Good people, bad people, and the rest of us

Posted on by Suki

The other day when we were talking to our kids about interacting with other people online, we came up against a problem that we face over and over as parents:

Concern #1: We don’t think it’s healthy for our kids to view the world as some horrible scary place they should be afraid of interacting with.

Concern #2: On the other hand, horrible scary things happen out there every day, and we want our children to have basic tools to deal with things that might come their way.

How you balance those concerns pretty much sums up your view of what your role as a parent is.

I tend to spend a lot of time standing in the middle of the seesaw, trying to keep it level. I did let my kids walk around the neighborhood alone when they were little. I didn’t prime them with horrible stories about mean people and what they will do to them. I did tell them that it’s OK to question the motives of adults they come into contact with.

Mean people R us, some of the time

A challenge for parents is to develop a consistent approach to how we deal with danger in the world, especially potentially dangerous people. What I came up with translates pretty well to the online world as well:

Premise #1: There is a small number of really terrible people in this world who want to hurt others.

Premise #2: There is a small number of really saintly people who will never hurt anyone or anything.

Premise #3: The rest of us just do our best with what life throws us.

I’ve never been terribly concerned about Premise #1, to tell you the truth. If you want your children not to be hurt by an adult, you’d do well to choose a partner who won’t hurt them because that’s who’s most likely to do it. If there are other people in your life who might hurt your children, do your best to change your life so that you don’t interact with those people.

Stranger-on-stranger violence is rare enough; stranger-adult-on-child violence is really quite rare. It’s also generally not possible to predict, so you can’t live your life assuming that everyone is out to get you.

Since you can’t reliably identify the saints amongst us, Premise #3 is where things get hairy. The fact is, sometimes we human beings don’t behave as well as we should. One of the situations in which we behave less well than normal is when we feel anonymous. Those who live in tourist towns, like me, can tell you without hesitation that people are less polite and leave more garbage lying around when they are at outside of their own community.

Our online lives have offered all of us a certain measure of anonymity and distance from the people we interact with. Even real humans that we see in the real world gain a certain amount of psychological distance online. People put things in email they’d never say to someone’s face. Facebook generates mini-scandals and lots of hurt feelings every day.

Do your best, keep trying to do better

So when we’re talking to our kids about taking care of themselves—in the “real” world or online—we’re more concerned about that huge number of people who are simply doing their best. We’re concerned whether our children are conscious of their own behavior and how it might affect others. And we’re concerned that another child that they met online may not have the same guidance from the adults in his or her real life.

I’m not saying that it’s impossible that the child they met online is actually a 34-year-old serial child kidnapper. It’s just that when I worry about which values to impart to my children, I put fear of someone running a red light and hitting them in a crosswalk way ahead of any of the more headline-worthy ways to get hurt in this world. It’s hard to resist the headlines (not to mention the Amber Alerts shining above the highways) and just plow forward with a hope that our kids will do OK for themselves in the world.

I think that open communication is the best way to do that. Each of us has to make a decision about where on the seesaw we want to stand, and then decide to be OK with that decision, no matter what happens.

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These are people who have died

Posted on by Suki

Perhaps you remember the Jim Carroll song, “People who died.” It was one of those songs that completely blew me away the first time I heard it. Not so much the 2346th time.

However, it’s on my mind today. It’s on my mind because technology has done this weird thing: It won’t let people die.

Nisene
Everything I put on the Internet, including my cat Nisene in the fog, achieves a sort of immortality. I just searched and found Nisene on Google Images! Immortality in all nine lives.

First, there’s my address book. In the past, after a few tries I found spiral bound paper agenda that I really liked, and every year I bought a new one. The one I liked had a small address book section in the back. Each year, I would transfer my important current contact information from one calendar to another.

“Important”: as in people I still like (at least sorta), people who still live near me, people who are alive.

When I was still using paper calendars, of course, I was younger, and more people I knew were alive. But then you keep going and life starts getting in the way. People you know succumb to the horrible diseases they’ve been living with (diabetes, multiple sclerosis), people you know and love die of old age, people you know get killed by terrorists, die of cancer, or…whatever.

The great thing about the paper address book at the back of my calendar is that each year, I culled the people who didn’t belong anymore. And perhaps that was one person per year.

But the digital lifestyle has changed all this. As my address book has grown, so has my hard drive. I don’t have to worry how many entries are in my address book—technology is far outpacing my addition of people important to my life.

And the result is…dead people.

Until last year, I just couldn’t face culling the deceased from my book. I do wish there were some feature in my address book to mark them “no longer with us” rather than just “delete.” But that’s not the case. In order to stop seeing my deceased loved ones (not to mention people I corresponded with briefly for an article I wrote), I have to delete them.

Deleting dead people is No Fun.

It seems so final. Yes, I should get over that. But it took me years to remove my lovely elderly friend Susie who was the first person more than 50 years older that I’d called a friend.

Susie was an aberration…until she wasn’t. People younger than I, people older than I, but within enough years to be in “my generation,” started to go. And I hesitated to remove them from my address book.

And then there’s social media.

LinkedIn, a service I find very useful as a business person, continues to recommend that I link with a former teacher of my son’s—a wonderful teacher, a truly incredible man—who succumbed to cancer a few years ago. Facebook lists several dead people as my “friends.”

I feel like we’re coming upon a new paradigm for “life.” Before the digital epoch, life was limited by flesh. And perhaps that limitation was extended a bit by paper in large buildings we called libraries. But life was life: You were born, you developed into the person you were going to be, you did stuff, then you died. If the stuff you did was deemed “important,” it might get “immortalized” on paper or film.

But in the digital life, nothing dies. In the European Union, they had to invent a “right to be forgotten.” In the US, we have no such luxury. Everything I do online is being sucked into the grand cyclone we call the Internet. When I step off this moral coil, my digital life won’t go with me.

I imagine my friends, my family, and my “friends” after I go: They join a new online service and they get the suggestion that they “friend” me, a dead person. They will be able to comment on my work, which will still be out there—alive, as it were. People I don’t know will receive suggestions for like-minded people to link to…including me, a dead person.

I’m not sure how I feel about this. On the one hand, hasn’t it been a goal of humans throughout the ages to achieve immortality? And doesn’t the Internet offer some sort of immortality? (Immortality 1.0. Sometime soon the Internet will be Old Hat and we’ll achieve Immortality 2.0. Stay tuned.)

On the other hand, seeing these dead people makes me sad.

“I see dead people.”

Yes, I do, when I search in my address book for “house.” When I go onto LinkedIn to post an article and once again, it suggests dead people who would help me further my career. When Facebook asks me if I want to “share” my latest news…with dead people.

Ponce de Leon would be flabbergasted. Undaunted, we move on into this new stage of human existence. Dead people are dead, but they don’t go away. It’s comforting, in a way, that they never leave us. But it’s depressing, in another way, that we can’t let the dead rest.

Finally, I have started to cull. Every once in a while, I save a backup of my address book, then I delete. The friend, the teacher, the colleague. Delete, delete, delete.

Then I move on with my life. They had a right, I remind myself, to be forgotten.

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