Kids' upcoming attitudes toward surveillance - any research or similar?

March 3, 2014 4:57 AM

Is there a book or a research article (or high quality speculation) to be found, which would ponder how frequent bombarding with "surveillance is a good thing" comments (appearing in media and made by some kind of authority) and "yet another security flaw appeared in a mobile application, in a web service or in a department of a company" news (which would happen to some high profile and well known company) affects kids and youngsters? I mean their mind is still shaping, so it would be interesting to know in advance, what kind of adults will they become? Naturally the mind of an individual is shaping throughout the whole lifetime, but it could be said that there are lots of people, who aren't or will not be very good at getting rid of their "old programming".
posted by spctrm to Education (3 answers total)

danah boyd is your woman. See: Social Privacy in Networked Publics: Teens Attitudes, Practices, and Strategies as one example. She does a lot of research around this.
posted by DarlingBri at 5:06 AM on March 3, 2014

Response by poster: No, that is not what I.. let me restate my myself: will kids a) learn to accept (without hesitation) a world, where police, NSA, Interpol etc. can reach everyone and intercept their messages at any choosen time without anything blocking them; b) become bored to news about (for example) multiple hundreds of credientials (loginnames and password hashes) lost to hackers? Danah Boyd seemed to write about the privacy as a choice of a person and in that sense it was partially related to this matter, but not enough.
posted by spctrm at 10:19 AM on March 3, 2014

I think the word you are looking for is "indoctrination". A quick google of "child indoctrination in schools" reveals a ton of super-right-wing sites that insist that public schools are nothing but a liberal indoctrination of children, and searching for "NSA Indoctrination of children" reveals that Obama is personally in cahoots with Disney to corrupt your children by showing a "Horrifying" (every single website uses that same word) cartoon about how wonderful drones are.

I'm not going to link to any sites, but all I can say is that the answer to your question is "it depends on who you listen to". It is generally believed to be true that media exposure of specific ideas does lead to cultural acceptance of those ideas, but based on the overwhelming number of scare-sites out there, I'm not sure that you will be able to find any reasoned in-depth articles about it.
posted by CathyG at 11:11 AM on March 3, 2014