On the night that Saddam Hussein was executed I was watching the 20/20 special on The Death of Privacy and, considering it was network television, it was interesting on a couple of levels. The premise was that Web 2.0 tools like blogs and now video are seriously challenging our sense of what’s private and what’s not. They interviewed soldiers in Iraq who were posting video to their blogs or YouTube, showing the intensity of the firefights they were in. And they showed a lot of examples of people behaving badly, both in the content of the videos they produced and in the seeming lack of regard for other people’s privacy. (One example in particular was a guy who had put together a video that he sent out to impress potential employers on Wall Street…instead it ended up on YouTube and he suffered a great deal of harassment and embarrassment over it.)
At one point, they started to discuss what this all meant for our kids. In the show, Jeff Jarvis was quoted as saying:
Young people just have a very very different view of privacy than people in my generation…The truth is, on the Internet, if you don’t reveal some of yourself, you won’t find friends.
The bottom line is that our cultural experience of privacy is changing, whether we like it or not. And I think it’s one of the biggest disconnects we’re experiencing with our students these days.
I struggle with this to some extent too, from both sides of the coin. I know that basically anything I say during workshops or presentations may end up on the Web. That just comes with the territory. But I wonder how much right I have to take what people in the audience say and use that in the posts that I write. Or when we have friends over, as we did this weekend, and the 15-year-old daughter casually reveals to her mother that she has a MySpace site, is it appropriate for me to blog the reaction and the ensuing conversation? Even without names? If they read it, will they be offended?
I feel like I should wear a button that says “I’m a blogger…you’re on the record” or something.
And of course, the big irony was that the last 40 minutes of the 20/20 episode was pre-empted by the news of the execution, the video of which has been watch over 1.3 million times on YouTube to date. I debated whether to watch it, but in the end chose to do so if for no other reason but to simply contextualize the discussion about it. I wonder if its horror is lost on some of our kids, however, who are so used to seeing public deaths played out over and over. And I wonder what all of this means in terms of the implications for teaching them how to navigate what Jeff calls on his blog, “the age of news served raw.” It goes back to every one of our students need to be editors first. The complex thinking needed to understand and really “edit” that video is not something you can find in a textbook. It involves understanding not just how it was produced and how it was distributed, but the political realities surrounding it, the motives of those who captured it, the different cultural responses to it, and, in the end, the ability to respond accordingly.
I wonder how many of our students who watch that video are engaged on that level.
I felt the need to investigate this story further:
http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wireStory?id=2771300
The hanging, not so much.