my space

I am well known to my family and friends as someone who is both glad and despondent over the new media that invests our lives at every point. The invention of word processing was truly an incredible blessing especially for all of us who remember manual typewriters, carbon copies, and white out. E-mail has also been a development that has revolutionized cross country and international communications. I still have a box of daily letters my wife and I exchanged while I was stationed in Korea. A phone call home at that time would have cost a day’s wages. Ham radio operators were the only practical means of communicating with missionaries abroad. For just these two developments alone, I count myself fortunate to have lived to see them. They rank right up there with the telephone, the airplane, and velcro. Yet, the dark side of the new media is with us as well, and we have yet to learn how to cope with it all. We cope, yes, in that life goes on. The struggle comes in determining just how much of our lives we will invest in it and in discovering to what extent it is affecting us for good or ill. These things are not readily apparent and take time to analyze.

I tremble, tip toeing where angels fear to tread, in challenging some conventional thinking regarding the social websites and the place they have come to occupy especially in the lives of our children. I have caught a glimpse or two into the world of adolescent ‘face-booking’ and have not been comforted. I had a hard time discerning the difference between it and the silly notes we used to pass in class in elementary school except that these are high tech in full color with photos. So, is that so bad? I had to think on that one. Obviously, the potential for cyber-bullying is incredible for ruining a reputation with a photo, rumor, or a total lie. None of us, I would hope, would allow our children to participate in this whole social networking thing unmonitored nor permit them to participate in cyber-assassination in any shape or form. This is not where my struggle is.

I am concerned about good kids just being their silly selves and having access to such a powerful interactive tool. Why? I am worried on two counts. First of all, both myspace and facebook require that all participants be 13 years of age or older. I suspect that I would be a rich man if I had a dollar for every less-than-thirteen year old with a myspace account. We need to re-examine our commitments to honesty and forthrightness if we are aiding and abetting access to these social network sites by our children. If these sites were as free of peril that some Christians might imagine, we should ask ourselves why it is that a purely secular company has put such age restrictions in place. It is a direct contradiction of our River’s Edge priorities to enable or allow our underage students to practice deception of this kind.

Secondly, I fear the propensity of on-line socializing to widen the chasm that separates teens from adult society. We know that given enough time and opportunity, teens will create their own sub-culture apart from the real world. What we now talk of as the “teen culture” is a relatively new phenomena that came about in the 1950s as a result of greater leisure time, increased prosperity, and the growing media. The markets picked up on the disposable income in the pockets of teenagers, and they became a target focusing on their interests and fads.

I would ask myself as a parent if I want to facilitate this social isolation which only seems to serve up in spades the most banal of adolescent dialogue. Scripture says that foolishness is bound up in the heart of a child. I am still discovering pockets of it tucked away in the nooks and crannies of my life. Anytime we allow children to pull apart and set up their own community unmolested by adult values, we should not expect much. At worst, we can look to “The Lord of the Flies” to see what can happen. And marvel not at the abilities of teens to speak in code, a new language safe from adult interception. Do you really know what your kids are saying?