It’s pretty much guaranteed that the next generation will grow up with the experience of always watched. Either they get watched by the parents who never let them do anything alone or by technology. Pretty sad in my view but almost inevitable.
I worry about the effect this near-real-time performance thing will have on them—it seems different, somehow, from just knowing your parents will see a graded paper come home in a week or two, to do it and immediately post it, where parents can comment and everything. It's creepy.
When I grew up, during evenings weekends and holidays, kids ran around in the neighborhood with their friends from sunup to sundown. Outside of mealtimes, parents had no idea where we were.
A generation later and parents started to time-box everything their kids do, soccer practise, play dates etc.
I think this is what makes millenials so comfortable with online surveillance, they see it as benevolent and benign, just like their parents were.
1) Ambition for kids to get into the right preschool so they can get into Harvard or whatever, causing more parents to put their kids in 'enriching' scheduled activities.
2) Unreasonable fear fueled by the media. Ironically, stranger child abduction gas been declining steadily for decades and is at an all time low.
This has effectively removed more free range kids to the point now that if you wanted your kids to go play outside, they wouldn't find any other kids out there to play with.
This is why I call it a reverse network effect. The value in playing outside for a kid is now lower since there are fewer potential playmates out there.
Its not all doom and gloom, there's hope for things to go the other way, towards privacy and freedom.
It's pretty amusing to me that I used to be the weird one connected to the internet all the time because I pretty much couldn't do anything else, and now that's a shared experience with the entire new generation.