PurpleCar

Here’s today’s Dear Abby:

DEAR ABBY: My daughter and 12-year-old grandson “Patrick” visit me on Sundays. Patrick watches TV in my office.

I was recently looking at the history on my Web browser after he had been there, and I noticed that Patrick had been visiting free porn sites and chat rooms on my computer.

I am disappointed that he has been looking at pornography and that he has put my computer at risk for viruses, etc. Should I talk to his parents? To him? Or should I ignore it and disable my computer when he visits? — GRANDMA ON ALERT

DEAR GRANDMA: You should do all three — so that Patrick’s parents can make certain that when he uses a computer at home he can be supervised. And if the parents haven’t yet had “the talk” with their son, suggest they place it at the top of their agenda.

OK advice from Dear Abby (who is now the daughter of the original Abby). I would go further to say that you have to lock down computers when you have young guests. This is a pain in the neck, of course, but it’s the best option. I forget to do it many times myself, and my 10 year old likes to play with friends on kids’ game sites.

Kids know that many parents are savvy enough to check the browser history. So when they have access to the internet on a supposedly unmonitored computer, the first thing they usually do is look up porn. Kids look at porn on the internet. They are curious and it’s available. This is totally normal.

There are 3 major questions you have to ask yourself about kids looking at porn on the Internet:

1. Do I think my kid will be irreparably damaged by viewing one, a few, or many photos/videos of pornography?

2. Do I trust my kid to follow the house rules?

3. Do I want to spend time and energy on banning pornography and other damaging websites?

Let’s discuss.

1. Damage to personality, health, social skills: Many hobbies, pursuits, distractions like sports, video games, cooking, as well as porn-viewing, are run through the “Is it good for kids” gauntlet. I think we can all agree that viewing pornography is very inappropriate for children. But is the damage done by seeing some pornography so great that we must go through major inconveniences to ensure the exposure doesn’t happen? Psychology research can be a bit varied in this area. The general rule is that it depends on your kid. If your kid is resilient, well-adjusted and feels safe to talk with you about anything, then a few porn shots aren’t enough to justify canceling your broadband connection. This really only applies to older kids, say older than 9 or 10. Younger children can be frightened more easily, and show in research that their behaviors are more easily influenced by the videos they watch. Make an effort to shield younger children from any older children’s browsing. Younger kids wonder what the word “porn” means, but in general, there’s not much danger of them looking it up themselves. If your child is under 9 years of age and is finding and viewing pornography on their own, I’d take your concerns to a school counselor or child psychologist.

If your older child (9 years and up) is withdrawing from family and friends and spends most of their time alone in their room with their laptop, then it’s time to dig into things a bit. Your child is probably normal, as only the rare cases of porn and internet addiction will be seen in kids below the age of 18. While this behavior is thought to be normal nowadays, it isn’t healthy. But most kids won’t run into this danger. Most parents fear it, but statistically it’s still quite rare.

You have to judge your fear of pornography exposure against the efforts it will take to totally ban the internet from your house/phones/children’s lives. In my opinion, it’s better to talk to kids about pornography and how it distorts people’s (especially young men’s) views of sex and what a healthy relationship is. Repeated exposure translates into belief adoption. This is why advertising works. The more you are exposed to images, the more you expect reality to match those images. So, we don’t want kids looking at porn on the internet. You can’t stop the internet, so you have to stop the kid. Open and honest reinforcement of your personal values with your children is basically your only hope.  And anti-virus software. Definitely install some of that.

(P.S. Please don’t offer up filtering systems, parental controls, etc. All of that software is a joke. It’s poorly designed and all sorts of porn isn’t caught by the filters. I’m not wasting my money or my time on any service available right now. They just don’t stand a chance against human kid ingenuity.)

2. Trust: now that we’ve established that the only way to get a kid to not be influenced by the pornography they will surely see a lot of by the time they are 18 is to keep communication open and have frank talks –often– about how porn can be bad for people. The next thing is trust. I’ll be honest here. I trust my kid to respect my house rules, including internet use. BUT, I only trust her to her own limits. She’s 10 years old, not 30. At ten years old, it’s hard to enforce rules upon oneself and one’s friends. I’ve taken to locking down all machines when her friends come over. This includes the TV. (I neglected the cable at a sleepover. I awoke to find them watching TV at 2 a.m. Thankfully, the group of girls that were sleeping over were more interested in Disney channel movies than porn, but the porn-viewing capacity was there. I won’t forget the TV next time.)

I also realize that there will be times where my kids break the rules. We’ve established a “No Browser History Erase” rule on phones and internet connections. An erased browser history is an admission of guilt. This guilt comes with punishments. This rule is very well-known in our house. If I see a blank browser or any other efforts to stealth-browse the internet, heads roll.

I check the browser history on all devices on a random, regular basis. I call the kids over to ask about any URL or text message number I don’t recognize, and I demand explanations. It’s best to do this every few days or so, so you can remember when your kid had friends over or you had guests, etc. (By the way, don’t assume the bad-browsing wasn’t your spouse. It could have been. It also could have been the babysitter. Just note the dates and times of the browsing, and perhaps erasing of said browsing history.)

3. Time and Energy: How much effort and technical knowledge is parenting in this digital age going to take? Not much, actually. Checking text messages on phones isn’t hard, checking browser history isn’t hard. If you don’t know how to do it, search the internet on “Check text message history on a Samsung phone” or something similar. You will find step-by-step instructions. If you are a technophobe, I want you to know one thing: It isn’t easy to break computers. No, really. Click around, don’t be scared that your mistakes will FUBAR your device. Almost anything you can do can be fixed. It’s not likely that your clicking around is going to erase the hard drive. Overcome your fear. Search on Google.com for step-by-step instructions. The plain fact is that parents, grandparents and any child caregiver needs to know how to check browser history and the computer’s picture and video files. Pornography isn’t just a bad thing for kids, it can get you into a whole heap of legal trouble. Kids won’t know if they are looking at child porn or snuff videos, and downloading it can get you into hell with the Feds.

You can get technical enough to keep an eye on Internet use. That, actually, is the easy part. The hard part is having conversations about subjects you don’t want to talk about. Don’t wait for your kid to bring it up. I usually break the ice like this: “Oh my god, you would NOT believe what popped up on my screen today! It was a picture of _____! (e.g. a naked lady licking a man’s boot, an erect penis, a video of people having sex). I was so grossed out!” Then you can get into how those types of things are all just a fantasy, that real life isn’t all big fake boobs and leather straps.

However you want to say it is up to you. But you have to say it. Definitely talk about this with any child you have over 9 years old. (The younger ones can simply be told, “You know, Honey, there are scary, adult things on the Internet that you aren’t allowed to see.” Kids under 9 still see the world in black-and-white terms, so invoking “The Rules” usually works with this crowd.) Yes, yes, things were much nicer when Junior was 16 before he found Dad’s hidden stack of Playboys and Mom was secretly relieved Junior wasn’t gay, but that Hollywood version of kids’ sexuality never existed. We have to step up our game now. If we do it together and present a united front, the next generation will accept our terms of service.

Let me know how it goes. Let’s discuss in the comments.

_____________________

Here is an article that gives you some steps to do with kids of each age group who are searching for porn online: Kids Looking Up Porn

Here’s an another article that offers some ideas on how to teach kids that what they view can hurt them: Eye Bleach (http://www.purplecar.net/2011/06/beyond-eye-bleach/)

Please email me with any questions: christine (at) purplecar (dot) net

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Pull into PurpleCar Park!

Dr. Dan Ariely pulls in to PurpleCar Park to discuss his new book, The Upside of Irrationality: The Unexpected Benefits of Defying Logic at Work and at Home. Stop what you’re doing, pull the car over and listen in to Dr. Ariely talk about his fun and interesting research and the key things he’s found out about motivating (or de-motivating!) people, decision-making and even online dating.

Full transcript available, in pdf form below.

Dan Ariely PurpleCar Transcript

Some jerk on Twitter DM’ed me this message, out of the blue, soon after I followed him back:

RUDE!!!!

If you can’t see the direct message image, it says: “Please click [redacted] and wait for the second page (first goes after 40sec) then clcik ‘discover your influence’ and register” (yes, I noticed the typo in “click” and yes, I covered up the website.)

Anyone who has been using Twitter even for just a  little while knows that this sort of unsolicited request is verboten. It is a real breach in etiquette, and is a tactic used only by charlatans. This sort of thing damages rather than helps your reputation. This user never contacted me before. This rude DM was my introduction to him.

So, this was my response:

my DM back to this a-hole

(I know it has his picture there, but this DM is my response back to coffeemate49.) If you can’t see the DM I sent back, it says “1. Don’t DM me advertisements. 2. 40 seconds is a ridiculous loadtime. 3. You’re assuming I give a shit about my “influence.”

I then unfollowed this jerk, so he couldn’t send me any more unwanted solicitations via DM.

He then @replies me, sending this tweet, referring to an earlier general tweet of mine where I said “Here’s one thing to know about me: I’m going to tell you the truth. Don’t ask me if you don’t want it:”

coffeemate49 is a spammer

If you can’t see this jerk’s response, it says “@PurpleCar I very rarely DM followers, it was a request for a little social help not an advert – you’re rude rather than ‘truthful’. Bye”  A little social help? You want me to authorize my Twitter account to your API bullshit app and I don’t know you OR your app? Uh, no. That’s a no-brainer, you idiot.

Listen up, developers. This is a case example that demonstrates nicely how NOT to get people to test your app. Don’t DM ppl, and for god’s sake, make the site usable. I’m not sitting around a strange website for 40 seconds so you can scam my email and Twitter accounts.

I was merciful, and that, on Twitter is always a mistake, and I didn’t immediately block the guy. I then responded with this:

If you can’t see the text, I said “you commanded me to register for a site and u used dm to do it. That is rude.” Just because a person sticks in a “Please” doesn’t mean it wasn’t a rude direction. I don’t know this dufus. This guy didn’t take the time to ask me if I would consider helping him with a site. He never made the time to have a conversation with me on Twitter, no attempt at simple decorum. Forget it! That is a sure sign of a spammer, and clicking on any websites from people like this is a sure ticket on the trouble train.

So, despite this douchebag’s promise to say “BYE” at the end of his last tweet, he @ replied this:

Coffeemate49 is an asshole.

If you can’t see the image, his tweet says “ @PurpleCar I requested – your reading of my message as a command says far more about you than about me.”

Yeah. You know what it says about me, you stupid, immoral, uneducated jerk? It says, “I block you now.”

Today, popular (now second-generation) advice columnist Dear Abby answered a letter from an adult concerned that a teenager she knows has Devil/Angel Facebook accounts:

DEAR ABBY: I have just learned that a friend’s 16-year-old daughter has two different Facebook profiles. One is a “nice” profile to which she has invited me, her family and friends from her days at a Christian academy. The other, which is pretty raw, she uses with her new “wild” friends from public high school.

The first profile portrays her as the perfect student and daughter. The other includes explicit details about her sexual exploits and drinking parties. Should I keep my nose out of it or let her parents know about the dual identities? — VIGILANT IN EVERETT, WASH.

DEAR VIGILANT: Ask yourself whether you would want to be warned about your minor child’s drinking and sexual exploits or be kept in the dark, and you’ll have your answer.

Ms. Vigilant seems nosy to me. My first thought was, “Why is this woman stalking this child on Facebook?” My second thought was, “Why is she so darn angry with this girl?” Ms. Vigilant’s attitude toward the teen is not loving and understanding in the least.

This teen, we’ll call her D.A. for Devil/Angel, seems pretty savvy on the surface of it, using two separate accounts for different, shall we say, “interests.” I personally have two facebook accounts, one for my public persona (social media, writing, and acquaintances) and the other for family and friends I know in real life. The difference between D.A. and me, though, is I make no attempt to hide either account. Another slight difference: my posts on both accounts are not … “raw.”

Ms. Vigilant is a church-lady busybody and she should mind her own business. D.A. is a fool to think the “anonymity” of another Facebook account will save her from the bad consequences such public displays of poor behavior will bring. Miss D.A., if Ms. Vigilant can find your account, Harvard can too, Honey. Universities don’t like to admit students with “suspicious moral character.” Sororities, Fraternities, companies, potential mates, also will find your “hidden” account to be damaging to your reputation.

As a former server admin, I would never attempt to keep an anonymous account online without the help of professional security personnel. It’s kind of like a case when a lawyer gets convicted of a crime and she hires another attorney to represent her: Some areas of expertise are best left to the pros. I’m very technically adept, but real online security takes a lot of effort and skill. Anonymous status is an illusion online. Anyone with just a bit of techie chops can find just about anybody else, even with randomly assigned IP addresses via large hosts like Comcast or Verizon.

So, two lessons here. 1. Don’t stalk teens online or off. If you come across information that tells you her or his life is in danger, by all means, approach someone about it. Otherwise, their Facebook accounts aren’t your business. 2. Don’t post “fun” stuff like drunken revelry online. There are ways to share pictures and communications offline. If you MUST go online, don’t use Facebook. Try a private Flickr account instead. As new platforms emerge, there will be more and more easy-to-use private options. Facebook isn’t this private option and never will be. Wise up.

All that being said, it’s not a bad thing to keep multiple accounts for different crowds. In fact, this makes sense to do. You can streamline your content according to the interest of that particular cohort, which is what I do with my 2 Facebook accounts. Not such a bad idea. But keep it relatively clean, folks! Until privacy is truly offered in the online realm, everything you do, say, post, “like,” or share is not secure. Some sites offer a semblance of privacy, but that privacy is by no means guaranteed, especially if the site’s services are free, like Facebook.

Nebbie-nosed goody-two-shoes: shut-up. Teens, wise-up.