Thanks to my success with Twittercize, I was asked to guest lecture for a graduate Internet Marketing Communication class at the University of Denver. For one week, the online students obliged my rambling, opinionated self. This series of blog posts excerpts some of my answers. Special thanks to a real marketing whiz, Lora Louise Broady, for asking me to participate. You know I loves the spotlight.
My daughters have a lifestream, which is a fancy word for a blog that aggregates activity on other social media sites like Twitter, Twitpic, etc. I post tweets and photos throughout the day, via my mobile phone, so my wife and the grandparents can stay updated on our activities.
My wife expressly forbids any followers on their Twitter account (except Rachel Coleman, creator of the PBS series Signing Time, the only celebrity in my deaf daughter’s world) for fear of predatory activity. Personally, I don’t know how someone reading a message that says “I just spit up on Dad’s pants!” or “I went on the big slide by myself today” could possibly lead to an abduction.
Yes, I think the kernel of truth regarding internet predators has grown out of proportion.
But I did, however, work for eight years as an at-risk high school administrator (the students were at risk, not me, at least not all the time) and witnessed an absurd lack of discretion online by my students that later hurt them in court. I’d say that young folks are more likely to reveal too much, fall prey to the lure of popularity and add people they don’t know–and thereby potentially expose themselves to dangerous strangers.
The compromise: Parent Administrators.
Facebook could really benefit from encouraging this by allowing folks to establish “Father, Mother, Son, Daughter” relationships in the same way I can identify myself as in a relationship and married to my wife, but adding an administrator-like control to information shared. In other words, adolescents can do the important work of exploring their identities while you’re close by, but you can supervise (and delete their mistakes). Best of all, the door is still open for opportunities to engage in a learning dialogue about the whole process.
As it is now, you can’t snoop in your daughter’s online life because she doesn’t have one. And that’s no fun at all. 
Good idea on the father/child mother/child thing, I have 4 kids, they are under 8 years old, but once they decide to explore cyber space, I am not sure how I would monitor them… I am personly making YouTube videos and am sort of popular (as of today my videos have been watched 1,750,000 times), but that is OK for me, but I still have to watch how much of my kids I put online.