Bill MacKenty

The blur

I saw one of my students facebook post “my father joined facebook today - and the answer is no” on their wall.

Hilarious, and a perfect example of how things have changed with regards to privacy, private-space, and the idea of public space. I call this the blur. The standard definitions and understandings of privacy aren’t the same as they were in 1990. In schools, we normally encounter the blur when a student writes something inappropriate at home about something in school. But as we craft AUP’s, and think about how kids use technology, we need to remember things aren’t the same as they once were.

As I think about how kids communicate, and the transparent, interconnected, and ever-linked nature of their connections, I realize how the blur touches everything. Things stick around, media is easy to share, hard to forget, and also strangely impermanent.

I will write more on this later.