HW 7: Should Parents Read Kids Stuff??

I really enjoyed the chapter “My So-Called Blog” by Emily Nussbaum in Blog!: How the newest media revolution is changing politics, business, and culture by David Kline and Dan Burstein. That said, I am kind of on the fence about the question if whether parents should monitor everything that their middle-school children write online or not. I think that parents should talk to their children about what is safe to put out there on the web, but they shouldn’t read the things they write in blogs or social networking service sites. I see a lot of things on Facebook that I wouldn’t want my parents seeing that are on some kids sites. In this chapter Emily Nussbaum writes about teens and how they feel empowered by writing in their blogs. She also talks about how the adolescent experiences are made public by using the internet:

A result of all this self-chronicling is that the private experience of adolescence – a period traditionally marked by seizures of self-consciousness and professional confessions wrapped in layers and hidden in a sock drawer – has been made public. (Kline and Burstein 351)

In other words Nussbaum is saying that in the days before the boom of computers and the internet young people would write in their diaries and hide them from the world. Nowadays things like Livejournal and Blurty are some people’s diaries. I think that is an important quote because you can really saw that happen in the past years, the transition to the digital age!

Lindsay