"Mobile phones are bought for children so that they can be used to communicate with them, but also as a sort of game that parents perform with their children, whereby the phone provides a constant umbilical link spooled out from parent to child that the parent is able to use to reassure him/herself of their child’s safety." (Bell, 2006)
This "umbilical link" seems to cross many lines, but mostly it seems to cross the line of trust. It seems to some parents that the mobile phone is more a spying device rather than a convinient method of communication. This misuse of new media could be considered unethical, however, parents do have the right to keep watch over their children.
Sometimes parents take this right to the extreme. "he had recently enabled location tracking functions on his daughter’s cell phone—he remarked, ‘I know where my daughter is within a radius of 500 meters.'" (Bell, 2006) Surely there must be a point where the parents can trust their child enough to not need to know exactly where they are at all times. When did parents suddenly decide that this level of stalking was necessary? Children managed to grow up just fine without constant supervision before the new media had a stranglehold on society.
Has the new media made this "helicopter parenting" too easy?
References
Bell, G. (2006). The Age of the Thumb: a Cultural Reading of Mobile Technologies from Asia. Knowledge, Technology, & Policy, Summer 2006, Vol. 19, No. 2, pp. 41-57.
Firstly, great title, love it!
ReplyDeleteAlso, I completely understand where you are coming from when you speak about 'helicopter parenting'and just how far some parents are willing to go. But it makes me wonder, as new media is giving parents the ability to potentially 'stalk' their children, what other powers has it given the more, lets say, undesirable stalkers, in the world? With social networking allowing people to falsify complete identities and gain complete access to a profile of someone's information, location and even photos, this new media world has the potential to be a lot more dangerous!