Michelle Obama Doesn't Want Her Kids Using Facebook

Isn't a place like this (or reddit or any of the many special-interest forums out there) an equivalent replacement for the BBS era? Are the available platforms just not productive for "long form" writing?

impishidea.com

ImpishIdea was founded by a young HNer who was dissatisfied with previous literature discussion sites for young writers.

For my mother, writing basically made up the majority of her work. Accordingly, she spent practically a decade of my childhood making sure that I could write. She nitpicked my essays down to the last word and criticized me both on small-scale issues (e.g. sentence structure and word choice) as well as large-scale issues (structure of an argument, etc).

At the time I didn't quite realize how useful this was. As a kid, I was rather annoyed that I had to spend so much time to write short essays. Everything I did was a back-and-forth process between me and her -- in retrospect, rather like a code review.

Today, for me, writing is basically second-nature. Even when typing on IRC, if I want to, I can write reasonably well without putting much effort into it. The most surprising discovery for me as an adult was that this isn't normal -- that, particularly outside of our community here, most people really can't write without significant effort. From my perspective today, those years of nitpicking school writing assignments were the single most useful thing my parents did for me, and if I raise kids, I will ensure that I do the same to them.

One consistent observation I've made over the years is that the highest concentration of "good writers my age" during childhood was to be found in school scifi/fantasy writing clubs, text-based RPs such as MUSHs, and so forth. I don't know which direction the relationship goes in however: do such activities attract good writers, or do people become good writers through them? Or is it both?

Your kids will have an account, if they don't already. No special software is needed, just a browser and the ability to remember a password. School, library, friend's house...in this war it isn't you vs. them, it's the smartest, most motivated kid they know vs. the dumbest, most apathetic adult they know.

I don't see the connection between Facebook and writing. There are still forums they can participate in that serve whatever interests they have.

Also, don't you think reading newspapers/magazines/books (either online or on paper) are a better way to improve your langauge (written/verbal/comprehension) than internet forums?

Well there's also a significant danger of security leakage if the girls talk about what their family is doing, I guess.

It won't be a moot point for long; Malia turns 13 in July.

Maybe that's true if your last name is Obama, but both my sisters had accounts before they were 13 (hell my youngest sister still isn't 13...).

doesn't this mean though that you'd have to keep them off the internet in general? It's not like (no pun intended) Facebook is the only forum for expressing one's opinions.

A portable, federated, school-based social network might be an interesting end-run around the data lock-in problem.

You could pitch the solution as a sort of portal-with-social-network-features to the school (something they're all keen to have) and you'd wind up with a huge userbase and a steady stream of profiles that want to port-out or echo-out from their school-based service each and every year. And, as even large schools are tiny on an internet-scale, scaling problems are vastly simplified.

Then each outside service that wanted to be able to take these profiles in, or allow a link between an in-school profile and one of their profiles (so Sue's uploads to the photography club make it to the flickr stream their parents can subscribe to), would essentially be signing on to a common data format and interchange protocol.

"I'd prefer something owned and operated by the schools themselves."

I strongly disagree. Part of the point of these things would be to not be the school, to emphatically not be the school. My BBS days would have been much less interesting if everything had to be sanitized for school authority consumption.

At some point children are no longer in school. It would be nice if they have some miniscule amount of experience in being in a not-school environment, what with that making up the majority of their lives. If schools are anything they are already too large, in terms of the footprint they leave on our children's lives.

Our home has no broadcast TV. We do Netflix and Hulu for some (mostly advert-free) entertainment. My 12-year-old son can only go online via the living room PC (mostly because he doesn't have a PC in his room) and my 15-year-old daughter has mostly free-reign to do what she wants online via her netbook. I'd much rather have my kids reading and writing stuff online (even if some of the correspondence was questionable), as opposed to drooling in a trance while watching the boob-tube.

Call me a parent with weird priorities, but I'd rather my kids hold their own on places like Reddit and (yes, even) 4chan over watching much of the crap on TV (extreme left/right hate politics on CNN/FOX/CNBC, Hanna Montanna, reality TV, etc.). Not that either of them know of Reddit or 4chan yet (that I'm aware of), but I assume you catch my meaning.

Of course, the 'net does have a lot of TV-like mindless crap that can be just as (in my opinion) soul-killing as TV; things like Farmville and other pointless drivel. However, the kids don't seem to get hung up on stuff like that. Yet. We'll see, I guess.

This brave new world of parenting is always a mixed bag, isn't it?

Yes, for the younger side of the tween set. There's an unfilled gap, though, between Club Penguin and Facebook, at least according to my eldest daughter, who went on Facebook the minute she turned 13, literally-- she sat there with the form filled out, the mouse hovered over the "submit" button as the clock struck midnight. For her, Club Penguin lost its shine around age 11, and I was a hard-ass in terms of sticking to the Facebook TOS-- according to her, all of her friends were already on Facebook, and I tend to believe her, as it took her less than 18 hours to rack up more "friends" than I have.

And Webkinz, but typed chat is unavailable to my kids. I have one around 12 years old now, and nearly all her friends have Facebook profiles (verified, usually wide open), so it's hard to explain why she can't have one yet. I don't really think there's anything terribly wrong with it; just another way to communicate, like cell phones and, much earlier, telephones. We let them use email, so I'm starting to question the barrier we put up ourselves to Facebook.