Posted by hyperfocus on March 22, 2011, at 16:37:49
So I wake up in the morning, eat breakfast, head upstairs to do some work. Everybody's gone out. My dog comes in from patrolling the perimeter and lays down on the rug. Then I think I hear something. Then my dog pricks up her ears and starts getting excited. She's wagging her tail and looking at me, not like 'Warning, danger.." but like "Hey there's something I wanna show you - you're not gonna believe this."
m'kay
She's looking at the door to my brother's room. Then I distinctly hear person noises and like...music?. So I look at her and say "what the heck?" Everybody's gone out. But she's 1/2 pit and 1/2 lab so very little goes on around our house without her knowing. So I go and knock on his door. Anybody there? No answer. I do it a second time, a bit sterner.
Then this teenage girl who I've never seen before opens the door.
m'kay
Cut a long story short - she and my brother planned to 'hang out today.' Which is cool, I guess, because I'm not interested in my brother's life. They're both 19 (or so she says, which could or could not be true.) But when I was growing up we didn't really do this kind of thing (before university, anyway.) And it sounds just like my brother to leave her here when he knew he had to go out. Then in the course of trying to get to know her better (since I didn't know what else to do) I ask her where she's from. She lives in another town about 25mi away. So I ask where she and my brother met.
She says "on Facebook"
m'kay
I didn't really tell her anything because like I say it's not my business. But I really wonder what her mother and/or/father would say if they knew their daughter had left her home early this morning to go hang out with a guy in another town she met on Facebook. She spent the night here too.
m'kay
Back in my day (yeah uphill both ways in the snow, whatever) the only way that two people could communicate with each other was over the phone - which was usually located in a conspicuous place in the home. It's not that kids couldn't do this sort of thing, it was just harder. Nowadays we got Facebook and text and email and apparently doing stuff like this is the norm. Personally I'd be madder than hell if I knew my daughter did something like that. For the whole day I kept idly wondering if her father wasn't going to show up in front our house with a shotgun or something.
I've seen so many naked pictures of teenage girls taken in their bathroom mirror that it doesn't even interest me anymore. And I've seen a sex video of at least one teenage girl who's from our town and there's others which I have no interest in - it's so common most people are like blase about it. But like I was telling my mom, what these kids do with technology can really hurt them. Once you copy a video or picture - that's it, there's no way of ever destroying it. Everybody on PB knows how hard it is to erase info about them on the internet. These girls trust their boyfriends, think they'll always be together, want to be sexy and edgy and grown up. Beyonce and Lady gaga and all the rest telling them to let their bfs take pictures of them on their phone. And then one day everybody in the school gets to see them naked, or worse. That girl in the video is going to have that follow her for the rest of her life; when she's looking for a job are her employers going to see it too?
Nowadays there's Facebook and SMS and camera phones and it seems there's absolutely no way to monitor who your kid is communicating with or what they are sending each other. I'm not really looking forward to raising kids in 2020. I'm a programmer - I work with computers all day but the social and moral side of technology didn't really register with me til I met somebody's daughter who arranged a hookup over at my house.
poster:hyperfocus
thread:980911
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/social/20110111/msgs/980911.html