Mom, get off my blog!

Bomba de Luxe (not her real name) has been writing a blog about her life for about four years (tinyurl.com/yw7cjb). During this time, her son also managed a blog, which she accidentally discovered just recently.

"He responded on another blog and used his own name, and I also recognized the language he was using," his mother says. "So I clicked on his name [at the bottom of his response], and got to his blog. It turned out that he began writing almost at the same time I did."

Following this discovery, she put a post (tinyurl.com/yw8ml) on her own blog. "I've discovered that my son has a blog," she wrote. "He writes there about his desperate love for a relationship that ended ... He lives his memories there, using harsh words, over and over in interminable suffering."

Bomba shared her dilemma with her readers. Should she "observe him from a virtual distance ... leave him alone, to toughen up and grow at his own pace? Or should she reveal herself, and come out from behind the curtain, to hold him, hug him, cry with him?"

This dramatic post triggered a stormy debate on the blog, with over 300 responses. Many teens accused Bomba of invading her son's privacy, and said she should have stopped reading as soon as she realized it was her son's blog.

"I saw a lot of angry responses to that post, from both boys and girls," Bomba says. "But eventually I decided to go with the simplest solution, which seemed most correct to me: I told him exactly what happened and left the decision up to him, whether or not to close the blog and open a new one.

"He was actually happy about my discovery, and when he writes something he wants me to read he tells me to visit his blog," Bomba continues. "I think that most children, however, would have responded differently."

Yemima, a teacher at a junior high school in the center of the country, received an unpleasant surprise when she discovered the thriving blog scene of the teens at the school where she teaches. One day, she googled her own name, out of curiosity, and found that she was mentioned in a blog written by one of her students, along with epithets like "witch" and "monster."

"She did not keep this discovery to herself," says Oren, another teacher at the same school. "Instead she told the teachers in the staff room the very next day, and consulted with the principal about how to respond. She also spoke to the homeroom teacher of the girl who wrote the blog, but in the end, they decided there was nothing they could do, apart from raising the subject in class. This created a very unpleasant atmosphere, although eventually the teacher became a little less strict with her students."

Following that incident, Oren began googling the names of his students.

"As an educator, I was less interested in the gossip and criticism of the teachers," he says. "It was more important for me to learn about the students' problems and that they do not share them with me. If I noticed, for example, that one of my students was going through a difficult period, I would do something about it."

Oren said he had no qualms about tailing his students on the Web.

"I see it as a teacher's obligation, just as a teacher has to know when to intervene when he finds a note in class that hints at abuse against another student. Since today's children literally live on the Net, to me that is the place to look for such hints."

The Web is a world largely controlled by youth, and they feel safer there than any other age group. Many children build their relationships through blogs, chat rooms and various other social networks and express their feelings and experiences there. To what extent should adults, primarily teachers and parents, consider themselves a target audience for the information written by teenagers? Recently, teachers and therapists have been discussing the amount of freedom adults should allow themselves in invading the online lives of children.

One thing that is clear is that even when the Web pages are accessible to all, youth usually do not intend to share their secrets with their parents and teachers.

Efrat, the mother of a teenage daughter, came to this realization after a difficult crisis with her daughter. Efrat, too, had discovered that her daughter was secretly writing a blog. When Efrat began to read it, she encountered two more surprises: It turned out that her daughter was a lesbian and was blaming Efrat for all the emotional turmoil she was feeling. Efrat did not know how to talk to her daughter about the blog's contents, and decided respond on the blog itself, identifying herself by name, i order to defend herself against all the accusations the daughter had made. The daughter was shocked by this intervention, and responded with rage that went beyond the limits of cyberspace.

Sandra Weber, who lectures on education at Concordia University and contributes to a group blog on educational issues (spotlight.macfound.org), believes adults should respect their children's wishes and not visit sites not intended for them.

"Young people trust adults to be smart enough to realize that it is plain rude to go snooping on children's Web sites without their permission. As public as their postings may be, it is 'bad form' and an invasion of privacy to visit a personal site that you know was not intended for your eyes." (Quoted, in English, on the [Hebrew] Web site Learning and the Internet, tinyurl.com/24vnvn).

Many parents apparently do not agree with this opinion and closely follow their children's postings, either out of curiosity or a sense of responsibility. A study published last month in the British paper The Times, found that about half the parents in the United Kingdom try to monitor the sites their children visit. Many parents go as far as to open a page for themselves on MySpace and "offer their friendship" to their own children, in order to spy on them or test their openness to reveal personal information on the Internet. Another study, conducted in the United States, found that most children make an effort to conceal their identity from unwanted adults, usually by making up a nickname. According to that study, 46 percent of young people plant false or misleading information in their pages to make identification harder.

There is apparently a kind of "evasion game" between the generations, with one side stalking the other to gather information and the other making every effort to conceal it. A study conducted for the Israel Internet Association by Prof. Dafna Lemish, head of the Department of Communications at Tel Aviv University, and Dr. Rivka Ribak of Haifa University's Department of Communications, found that many children in Israel take precautions to erase any trace of their Internet habits. According to the survey, some 30 percent of Intrenet users between the ages of 9 and 18 delete the Internet addresses they visited from the history section of their browser.

Lemish believes such actions are natural and even necessary. "Many adolescents are skilled at concealing information from others," Lemish says. "But one has to remember that adults do this, too. Just as adults try to hide the fact that they have visited porn sites, for example, children also have a right to privacy."

Detective-like activity on the Internet is an expression of the parents' fears. They feel that they are losing control of their children's lives. Lemish calls it "moral panic," and explains that it occurs every time a new communication medium is introduced. "The balance of power and control over new technologies favors children," Lemish says. "And the adults are afraid that the Web is causing major changes in the concepts of children and young adults, for example regarding sex and suicidal behavior."

Lemish will present her research on this subject at a conference at the Netvision Institute for Internet Studies on June 28.

"It's true that our studies show a very wide gap between what children are doing with the Internet and what parents think they are doing," Lemish says. "But this lack of knowledge is no different than the situation before the advent of the Web. Parents don't know what their children are doing on the Net, in the same manner that they don't know what goes on at class parties or clubs. The Internet is rife with dangers, but also is surrounded by superfluous populist history. We need to ask ourselves how much respect we have for our children and adolescents, and remember that they are entitled to privacy and have lives of their own."