Fujiko Suda: Worklife

Identity integrity of adults and children in internet world, physical world

Dec 22, 2011 21:13 pm / Add a comment

Hav­ing chil­dren was the best thing I have ever done. Ever since my first son was born 26 years ago, my chil­dren taught me more than any­body else I know.

Liv­ing together with mother-in-law, hus­band and chil­dren was the next best thing. As researcher, I would always be stimulated.

One of the most amaz­ing things my chil­dren taught me recently is the way they relate to the inter­net and phys­i­cal world. Maybe it is just in Japan, but a few years ago, one would not reveal one’s true iden­tity on the web. It was a dif­fer­ent world, a sec­ond life where you live as some­one else. I guess most of humans are not good at liv­ing two lives. Because by now, peo­ple who has been liv­ing in inter­net and phys­i­cal world for years act pretty much the same way as they had in the phys­i­cal world. The pro­fes­sional social net­work, LinkedIn, only makes sense if we reveal our pro­fes­sional his­tory. Face­book friends are not real friends unless if we reveal who we are. At the same time, liv­ing in both inter­net and phys­i­cal world is more strict than just in phys­i­cal world, because we are scru­ti­nized in many instances. If we uploaded silly pho­to­graph of our­selves, or if we wrote inde­cent com­ment on the web, we instantly devalue our worth. I have been sens­ing this for some years now, but I have been amazed that my chil­dren and their friends who grew up with inter­net have just as much integrity about main­tain­ing their rep­u­ta­tion as we adults do.

When my 17 year-old and I were dis­cussing the use of Twit­ter about a year ago, his advise not to retweet other people’s tweets struck me. He said, you do not know the full inten­tion or mean­ing of tweets, and you should not casu­ally repeat what oth­ers say. He is very care­ful not to write any­thing that would harm his rep­u­ta­tion on the web. He knows the impli­ca­tion of tainted rep­u­ta­tion; it will remain for­ever in pub­lic eyes.  Recently, a new type of busi­ness that erases your pub­lic mis­takes or hide your past from the web have been devel­op­ing, but that will prob­a­bly take another 5 to 10 years to be known and used nor­mally on the web. Mean­while, rep­u­ta­tion man­age­ment is one of the key fac­tor in today’s world. Per­haps it is espe­cially so in Japan, because teenagers today have been using social net­work and other com­mu­ni­ca­tion means on the web for many years already.

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