Digitally safe?

It is claimed that the 'digital birth' of a child is around 6 months. They first begin to appear online when they are on average 6 months old. This baby (6 weeks old at the time the picture was taken) seems to be accessing digital content using an iPad. But is he really? This is one of many evocative images of young children using technology that have been circulating on the web recently. It seems that children really 'get it' when they use technology.

But we should exercise caution before when we make such claims and assumptions. How do we know that the little boy in the picture is actually doing anything with the iPad other than looking at it, or randomly touching it? And how do we check the claim that the digital birth of children is 6 months? I don't know where this statistic came from, and probably, neither do you. And yet these claims are swallowed whole by a lot of people, because they sound convenient, and they neatly fit into our assumptions about how children use the web, technology and other digital tools.

Actually, children are appearing on the web much earlier than claimed. I (and no doubt you too) have seen images of unborn babies in ultrasound scans, sent to me on social media by friends and family. Children are appearing online before they are born, and regardless of the ethical implications, the increasing regularity of this occurrence says something about the glibness of the society we are living in. How do we expect children to react when they are older and able to decide for themselves what pictures of them might be publicly available online? What are we doing to our children? More importantly, are they safe?

This week there was a warning from school leaders that the new Snapchat feature called Snap Maps is exposing our children to danger. Many schools take online safety very seriously, and won't even allow photos to be taken of them within school settings. For most teachers, the capability for children to share their location and routes from home to school on a public digital space is the stuff of nightmares. In their defence, Snapchat argue that Snap Maps is a feature that can be switched on and off, but how many children know how to do this, and are aware of the potential dangers? It's a topic that needs a lot more discussion and as technology becomes more sophisticated and increasingly available to children, these discussions will become more urgent. As ever, your views on this are very welcome in the comments box below.

Photo by Steve Paine on Flickr


Digitally safe? by Steve Wheeler was written in Plymouth, England and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.