Google (via their acquisition of Motorola) has two new products under development that may never hit the market. The first is a scannable tattoo that would allow people to avoid entering passwords (while also taking on the mark of the beast). The second is a pill people would swallow that would emit a low frequency signal so that they would have to be present for their Google account to work. I'm not bothered by this, if it's voluntary. But the tricky side of all things voluntary is that they eventually become accepted practices and then social norms and, if we're not careful, legal policies. We like to think of Big Brother as this distant, evil force that oppresses people. But often, it's a fun, convenient drug, Matrix-style. What's your pill? You can block people with walls, but you can also distract them with shiny objects. We're not all that different from raccoons that way. So, it has me thinking about students and their online interactions. I don't believe in walling people off from online spaces. I'm often the teacher advocating for districts to allow blogging, webtools and social media, because I want students to have a positive and meaningful digital footprint. I don't want students to feel that they must be anonymous online, hiding behind masks. At the same time, I want students to respect the right to privacy. I want them to observe sound echoing off the racquetball courts. I want them to spend time in a forest, where they can't differentiate between a thunderstorm and the wind blowing through the trees. I want students to embrace solitude and know what it means to be alone. Really alone. But in a good way. It's for this reason that I want gates. (Not the Gates of broken Windows) I want students to value the right to privacy, but I want them to be encouraged to go public and be authentic as well. We need to create spaces of permission where they have gates instead of walls and they can freely decide how public or private they want to be based upon the context and the timing. I want students to have the permission to say, “I have nothing to hide. But I just want to be alone for awhile, outside the ultra-public lens of social media.” But I also want them to know the beauty of the real relationships that can happen in a connected context. photo credit:
arkiss via
photopin cc
