Image: 'Beehive Head' by Josie Fraser

Via D’Arcy, who has been ‘Deflickring’ (resetting permissions to friends and family-only access) his account of his son’s pictures in response to Flickr You from Cole Camplese.

The post draws attention to a bunch of issues and decisions to be made about putting pictures of our kids online. As a parent, and also as someone who has the opportunity to talk to young people in the context of work about there own web practices and strategies for a great and safe experience of tech, the implications and impacts of posting children’s pictures publicly is something I’ve had to think about. So Coles post offers a neat starting point for looking at some of the strands.

Most information tech professionals have, by definition, a reasonably easy to find online presence – their non-anonymous blogging, networks, and service use are typically part of their professional as well as off-duty activities. We’re also used to belonging to communities of people we mostly like, who we perhaps know exclusively or primarily online. So it may seem like an obvious extension of that to post up pictures of our families, to model our everyday sense of our experience of ourselves online. There are probably a lot of parents who just don’t think about the implications of the whole world being able to check out their children’s pictures. So what are the issues?

Firstly, there’s thorny the issue of consent. Children aren’t recognised as being able to give conformed consent about a lot of things. If your child’s school, for instance, wanted to use a picture on their website, they would have to seek parental consent. Here are Surrey County Councils guidelines for using images of children. Some of these guidelines address legal issues and responsibilities; some additionally address equality and e-safety issues.

There are also ethical, or just straightforwardly thoughtful, considerations. My mum has a particularly embarrassing picture of me that haunted the whole of my childhood. As an adult, I’m ok with it (no, really). Thankfully my mum was mostly sensitive about my particular loathing of this picture and didn’t get it out at every available opportunity – if she’d have put it online I can imagine I would have been mortified. Maybe not at the time she put it up, but certainly a few years down the line, and especially if anyone from my school had come across it.

There's also the issue of digital presence. Is it up to us to contribute to our children’s digital presence? Would you have liked your parents contributing to what searches of you might return? As Scott comments on Flickr You:

“…they have no say in the matter, and yet you are making choices about their identity online, which impacts their identity far into the future. I think the issue of safety is real, but I also think you have an obligation to allow your children (and your wife) to create their own sense of self.”

The other obvious issues are internet related child abuse and bullying. I’m very much against a moral-panic approach to using technology, and I also think it’s very important that we evaluate and regard risks appropriately. While the vast majority of child abuse takes place entirely offline, and is typically perpetrated by the victims family or immediate circle, that’s also no reason to dismiss the chances of a child or young person we know coming into contact with someone who could harm them. We take steps to educate them about a range of strategies they can use to look out for themselves in their offline and online dealings. In the same way, we need to model good practice ourselves. I’d encourage my son not to put inappropriate pictures of himself online, including ones that could come back to haunt him, and to never put pictures of his friends online without express permission. I don’t want him posting and individual pictures that identify him by his name and by specific everyday locations, and I’d ask him to consider the information that someone could put together from the range of resources he puts out there, in the same way I’d ask him not to give his home address to complete strangers.

"The objective profile of the United States, then, may be traced throughout Disneyland, even down to the morphology of individuals and the crowd. All its values are exalted here, in miniature and comic-strip form. Embalmed and pactfied. Whence the possibility of an ideological analysis of Disneyland (L. Marin does it well in Utopies, jeux d'espaces): digest of the American way of life, panegyric to American values, idealized transposition of a contradictory reality. To be sure. But this conceals something else, and that "ideological" blanket exactly serves to cover over a third-order simulation: Disneyland is there to conceal the fact that it is the "real" country, all of "real" America, which is Disneyland (just as prisons are there to conceal the fact that it is the social in its entirety, in its banal omnipresence, which is carceral). Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, when in fact all of Los Angeles and the America surrounding it are no longer real, but of the order of the hyperreal and of simulation. It is no longer a question of a false representation of reality (ideology), but of concealing the fact that the real is no longer real, and thus of saving the reality principle."

Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulations,in Selected Writings, ed. Mark Poster (Stanford; Stanford University Press, 1988)

Trevor Norris: hannah arendt and jean baudrillard: pedagogy in the consumer society
Douglas Kellner: Jean Baudrillard After Modernity: Provocations On A Provocateur and Challenge
Edward Scheer: “The most delicate of operations”: Baudrillard’s Photographic Abreactions

Just in time for Valentines day, an easy if pricey way to reinforce gender role stereotypes through the power of laptops: Cenio Arttops come in two flavors, and guess which one is bigger (15.4-inches!), more powerful and more expensive?  "King" and "Queen" laptops.

I guess in an industry which persistently thinks of women and technology in terms of booth babes, someone somewhere will argue that this is progress. Uglyer than a Dell.

Hi to anyone reading from China - I've been playing over at the Great Firewall of China, and I'm pleased to find that although SocialTech itself is banned, you can still get here via the default url. None of my other typepad hosted sites have been blocked, so I'll try to continue spreading the subversion evenly.

Head over to the site to test your own urls relationship with the Chinese government's filtering software, and read more about this great project.