GUEST POST: Technology Tethered

This Guest Post is from Blake Dumais.  Along with our friend Mark Seager, Blake & I meet up regularly as we discuss life, politics, raising children and theological issues.  Like what he has to say?  Follow him and all his wild adventures at @bdumais15

As an old guy and cyber-immigrant looking out for his soon to be thirteen year old daughter, I took the Facebook plunge a couple of years ago to find out what all the buzz was about.  In nothing flat, I was obsessively updating my status and dancing a victory jig as I passed my wife’s “friends” total.  Baby’s have their pacifiers tethered to their onesies while everyone else is tethered to iPhones.  Technology isn’t going away, so rather than worry about it, I want to teach my kids about another tether, the one that will lead to their past.

When I Google my name, I see a single obscure hit about a race I ran twenty years ago.  And no, I really didn’t set the 50-55 age record in 1991 like it says.  Although it’s nice to hold a record that will never be broken.  There is nothing on what schools I attended, what I “like” or who my “friends” are.  In fact, I am very happy that I have such an anonymous past and that no one (read: my kids) can read about my misspent youth.  Those days are over.  Our children’s every key stroke, search and upload with be part of the ether forever.  After our little cyber-natives have been logging on for a few years, what will they have revealed about themselves to the world?  Our kids could find themselves painted into a digital box, built by inappropriate status updates, compromising pictures, revealing cell phone videos and other posts that will exist in perpetuity.  The possible repercussions are ominous but we hardly give them a second thought.  Prospective colleges and employers won’t have applications, they’ll simply see an online persona.  I want people to have a chance to meet my daughter, without preconceptions, and to get to know her as a person rather than a profile.

And no, the answer isn’t to forbid Facebook in my house like some horse and buggy driving, anti-technology zealot.  Kids need to learn to use the cultural medium without succumbing to the cultural message.  How to think before they post, how to say no to being somewhere they shouldn’t be, before the picture or video gets uploaded.  I really want people to know my daughter for who she is, rather than who they think she is based on a Google search.  I pray that with God’s guidance, her mother and I have prepared her; given her the power to say no, the wisdom to choose good friends (the old fashioned flesh and blood kind), and shown her where to draw some basic lines.  Her day on Facebook is just about here and I will happily let her post away.  I pray that, like Paul, she will be able to say:

I eagerly expect and hope that I will in no way be ashamed, but will have sufficient courage so that now as always Christ will be exalted in my body, whether by life or by death.  (Philippians 1:20)

P.S. While I am planning a come back in the race to have more “friends” than my wife, I am on Facebook hiatus.  But that’s a story for another post.