Parent Company

Teen tragedy and online anonymity

When word of tragedy spreads, such as the news that came out Monday about the deaths of five young people from Amherst -- four perished in a car crash and one died from illness -- it's something we want to talk about. At the water cooler (if those exist anymore), the coffee stand or the lunch table, we all say, "Did you hear? ... One of those girls went to grade school with my niece ... Didn't your neighbor, the math teacher, have him in class a couple of years ago? ... "

And our new gathering spots are online. Today's story on Buffalonews.com about the car crash has more than 65 comments from readers. The stories about both tragedies were much commented upon on this site and on the sites of Western New York's TV stations.

Some of the comments are respectful, some even informative. Others, not so much.

When word first came out about the death of 15-year-old Chelsea Oliver from a then-unspecified disease, some comment writers proclaimed that she died from swine flu. Another commenter responded that he was Oliver's father and that his daughter certainly did NOT die from swine flu. (Today's news story says that Oliver had breathing problems that developed into pneumonia and sepsis, and a connection to swine flu has not been ruled out.)

You know what bothers me the most about the opinions and speculation from those comment writers? The fact that they are anonymous. Anyone writing under a pseudonym can post anything they want in a forum for comments, and as long as they don't use profanity or otherwise violate the posting guidelines, they're free to say anything, with no accountability.

I know that in theory this is free speech and in  the marketplace of ideas the truth should somehow rise above the din and the nonsense.

But I contrast this to public conversations that take place in forums such as Facebook, where one's identity is known. I can't post a comment on a Facebook page with a made-up identity such as "HeSaid2009," I can only post one as Greg Connors.

I noticed the same thing a few weeks back, when we were having a national conversation about health care reform. (This was somewhere between our national conversations about David Letterman and John and Kate Plus Eight.) A friend of mine started several discussions on Facebook about health care reform, and the debate was spirited -- occasionally heated -- between friends from each side of the political aisle.

I tend to avoid mentioning politics much on Facebook myself because I don't want to turn my wall into "Crossfire." I have good friends who are liberal and good friends who are conservative, and I see no need to provoke them into verbal sniping.

But you know what? Those debates on my friends' walls about health care stayed respectful because they were commenting under their real names.

The great blogger Seth Godin has written on this topic:

"Virus writers are always anonymous. Vicious political lies (with faked photoshop photos of political leaders, or false innuendo about personal lives) are always anonymous as well. Spam is anonymous. eBay fraudsters are anonymous too. It seems as though virtually all of the problems of the Net stem from this one flaw, and its one I’ve riffed on before. If we can eliminate anonymity online, we create a far more civil place."

There are Facebook pages dedicated to memorializing the victims of the Clarence car crash and to Chelsea Oliver. If I were one of the parents of any of those children, I probably could not bear to look at those pages for several months. But I would eventually get to them, and when I did I would be glad for the fact that anyone leaving a note would have the guts to attach their real name to it.

--Greg

Surrendering to Google

All previous attempts and systems to keep our family organized have failed. So now we've looked at cloud computing from both sides now, from up and down, and still somehow have decided to let Google rule our lives.

Our family schedule is now fully integrated on Google calendar, and it's handy, I must say, to quote Ed Grimley.

Our school prompted this move to cloud computing by publishing all events via Google Calendar, and now they magically appear on our schedule. Then Greg loaded in the Bills calendar and U.S. holidays, and I threw in Canadian holidays, too. Don't want to drive to Ikea again only to find stores closed for some random provincial holiday like we did earlier this year.

So here's the concept. You create a Google account, give everyone in the family the login and password, and tell them to put any and all games, parties, events, meetings, dinners, doctor's appointments on Google calendar. Our plan is to have a family meeting every Sunday to go over it. Anything not put on the calendar is not recognized as an officially sanctioned event by parents.

This Sunday was family meeting No. 1, which revealed we had a conflict or two and we sorted it out civilly. Since kids love computers, they are much more reliable about entering events on Google than on our lame paper calendar. So far so good.

There are all kinds of calendars you can import. Since I am in my honeymoon planning phase, I am over-adopting this technology and have just added rather useless applications such as Phases of the Moon and Star Dates to our calendar. Not sure my life will be improved by knowing whether it's Waxing or Waning Gibbous time, but what the heck.

I hope this cloud has a silver lining for this family.

---Allison

Wii? Xbox? We're not game

We are the last people I know of with kids in the house who don’t own a gaming system.  No Wii, Xbox, PlayStation 1, 2, or 3. Which makes our house a not-so-desirable destination.

If we brought home a system and didn’t put restrictions on its use, at least one of our children would be permanently affixed to the controls. It’s not that we are anti-gaming, we just don’t have the bandwidth to add another device to our house that needs constant rationing and monitoring. And last time I looked, Madden 2010 wasn’t part of any core curriculum or scholarship fund. 

So I took a straw poll at a recent dinner party with friends who had boys, all of whom had gaming sytems of one sort or another.  I asked the advice of these experts: “Knowing what you know now after buying a Wii, Xbox, or whatever, would you do it again?” Unilateral response – “No!  Hold out as long as you can!”

 One father is even planning on buying a strongbox to lock the PlayStation controls in because the daily struggle of limiting game-time has become too much.

At our recent annual physical, our doctor gave us some wise advice: the 5-2-1 rule: eat 5 fruits and vegetables a day, spend no more than a total of 2 hours a day on screens (TVs, computers, games, phone texting, combined), and engage in 1 hour of daily physical activity. Sounds sensible … we are probably at 1-2-.5 right now, but at least we have a goal!

Since the 2 hours in this house is already used up on computers, I’m not sure what rationing system we would have to devise to squeeze in gaming. So for now, a gaming system is not in the cards. If the kids want to play a game, they can grab a badminton racket or actual cards, for that matter.

Have any of our readers had good or bad experiences with having these gaming systems in the house?

---Allison

R U nagging today?

Every parenting blog in the land is mentioning President Obama's speech that's being shown in many schools today. Turns out it's about working hard, being responsible, etc.  I'll leave it to the conspiracy theorists to decode the subliminal socialist messages. (Just kidding, folks.)

With that out of the way, let's move on to a Washington Post article about parents using text messaging to nag their kids.

One parent in the article mentioned that kids seem more receptive to a text from Mom or Dad than they do to live, in-person nagging. Texting reduces the eye-rolling factor, the theory goes.

While it certainly is tempting to depersonalize this parental chore, I think the article brings up a larger issue: How much should parents be micromanaging their kids' lives?

Whether you choose texting, e-mailing, IMing, Facebooking, Twittering, or even real-time conversation, is it your job to remind John and Jane to bring their lunch to school, bring their homework home, arrive home in time for dinner, let you know their whereabouts, etc., etc? 

In our house we had a discussion about alarm clocks last night. As in, a 10- and 12-year-old should be able to use said device to wake themselves up in time for school. Mom and Dad are not running a hotel with daily wakeup calls. We also don't make their beds, turns down their beds and leave a mint on the pillow.

Texting is a handy device, but I don't want technology to turn into an umbilical cord. Our job as parents is to raise self-sufficient human beings, not young co-dependents.

---Greg

Face time on Facebook

Let me talk to the ladies for a moment. Moms, do you use a picture of yourself in your profile on Facebook, or a picture of your kids or family in that spot instead?

There's a fascinating essay by the author Katie Roiphe on Double X  in which she scolds moms for symbolically diluting their own identity when they substitute a picture of their offspring for one of themselves.

The intentions are often innocent when moms do this, Roiphe says. It can be a pain to comb through your digital photo folders trying to find a flattering one of yourself. Some moms do it as the equivalent of wearing a wedding ring; a picture of you and your children announces that you're not on Facebook hoping to meet guys. Still, Roiphe writes:

"Facebook, of course, traffics in exhibitionism: It is a way of presenting your life, at least those sides of it you cherry pick for the outside world, for show. One’s children are of course an important achievement, and arguably one’s most important achievement, but that doesn’t mean that they are who you are. It could, of course, be argued that the vanity of a younger generation, with their status postings on what kind of tea they are drinking, is a worse kind of narcissism. But this particular form of narcissism, these cherubs trotted out to create a picture of self is to me more disturbing for the truth it tells. The subliminal equation is clear: I am my children. And perhaps for their health and yours and ours, you should be other things as well."

Isn't this kind of like the Christmas cards we get every year, the ones from friends we haven't seen in ages who send us a family photo in which the parents are missing? Sure, the kids are cute, but we've never laid eyes on them in real life. I'm curious to see what Jane or Joe looks like 25 years later, not little Jason or Jennifer.

How about when people use a picture of their dog or cat as their avatar on Facebook or Twitter? I'm not sure I can get my head around the psychological reasons for that.

---Greg

Bridging the humor gap

Can you believe it? Dunder Mifflin is closing its Buffalo office. That was one of the revelations on the season finale of "The Office" on NBC on Thursday night. Pop Stand has more details.

"The Office" to me has represented a sort of generational divide between me and our oldest daughter, Maddie. She loves the show, while I've never really quite understood the appeal. It pains me to admit that because I've always enjoyed nearly any kind of comedy. And subtle brands of humor can be more rewarding because you feel like your brain is doing some of the work, instead of just watching Three Stooges pratfalls or something.

The deadpan style of "The Office" has always seemed like a descendant of Christopher Guest's movies, such as "A Mighty Wind" (my favorite of Guest's films). I am a fan of Guest, mostly, but it's still really taken me awhile to warm up to "The Office." (The show lands in the same category for me as the humor of David Sedaris, another taste that I've never quite acquired. I know he is supposed to be hilarious, and I know that someone in my demographic is supposed to enjoy him. Friends give me Sedaris books for my birthday, assuming that I must love his subtle brand of humor. And I know that I should -- I blame myself here -- but I still can't flip the switch and become a fan, try as I might.)

While all three of our kids have been chuckling during "The Office" this season, I figured they had surpassed me in the sophistication of their senses of humor. Which is fine with me, but it doesn't explain their lingering fascination with "Hannah Montana."

Maddie has the earnest, serious side of most first-born children, so Allison and I have always particularly enjoyed watching her get such a kick out of "The Office."

When I was younger I was always an early adapter for almost any kind of humor. So I appreciate the irony of now being "the old man," whom certain types of humor is lost on.

I am finally starting to warm up to "The Office," particularly after Thursday night's "Company Picnic" episode in which the character Michael Scott and his former comedy partner did a skit at the company picnic called "Slumdunder Mifflinaire." Great stuff.

I guess I've really gotten older since the broader company of "30 Rock" is more my style these days when I turn on my stories on the TV.

---Greg

Sounds like a backup plan

We just averted a family disaster. The hard drive on our family PC crashed over the weekend. That is the machine on which we had stored all of our digital pictures, dating back more than 10 years. All of those photos would like be gone forever, but ....

I had installed a backup system. I believe I first read about JungleDisk.com on Lifehacker. Jungle Disk is something you install on your PC, you register for an account and you pay $2 per month, plus a very small charge for data uploading and storage (15 cents each month per gigabyte of storage used, and 10 cents per GB of data uploaded, 17 cents per GB of data downloaded). Then you set your Jungle Disk to back up all of your data (photos, documents, music, whatever else you choose) at a scheduled time and it takes care of the rest.

When the inevitable hard drive crash happens -- and it's a question of when, not if -- it provides great peace of mind to have one's data backed up.  When our technical guru, Mark, helped us tap into Jungle Disk to retrieve our photos, I told him that this not only saved my pictures, but also my marriage. If 10 years of family photos had vaporized, well, let's just say things wouldn't have been pretty around here.

There are other backup products out there. (See Lifehacker's suggestions.)  And some people do their own backing up, copying their data to an external hard drive, or to DVDs, compact disks, or anything else that stores data. But I knew that I wouldn't have the discipline to stay on top of a weekly or monthly backup schedule, which is why I went the automated route.

I'm not trying to pat myself on the back here. I just want everyone to get a backup plan for their data before it's too late. (Cue Karl Malden saying "Don't let this happen to you!")

---Greg

Idle parents and long tails

Elsewhere on the Internets:

* Tom Hodkinson's book "The Idle Parent" is excerpted on Slate. Hodkinson writes that when you give your children your undivided attention whenever they ask for it, the children grow more secure and independent, and soon will start asking for less attention, leaving you free to Twitter or play Scrabulous or watch your stories on TV.

* Over at Salon, Rebecca Traister discovers Freedom, a program for Macs that forces you offline for whatever period of time you designate. Freedom frees you from the tyranny of online time-wasting. (It's just another word for nothing left to surf.) If Freedom's makers release a Windows version, I'm ordering six copies for our house.

* Andy Ostroy, at the Huffington Post, has so had it with Twitter.

* Susan Heim worries about the long tail of Google when bloggers post their "bad parenting confessions," for all the world to read.

---Greg

Birthday parties: Time to call it a day

I'm not a fan of kids’ birthday parties. Yes, I’m part of the problem, having hosted oodles of them for our three kids over the years and doing unto other parents what I hate being done to me – which is spending a sunny Sunday afternoon in a windowless Petri dish of ball pits and laser rooms.

Once I hit 40 and the kids grew, hosting parties was no longer a core competence. While our first parties were high on production value, over time standards were lowered, themes were eliminated, and we outsourced to Chuck E. Cheese and the team at LaserTron.

Fortunately, we are moving out of the peak party years; our trips to Chuck E. Cheese are over, and LaserTron's grip on us is slackening. While I might get teary at the thought of not getting to hug Chuck E. again, I won’t miss the stampede at the prize redemption counter. Or the endless pleas for more tokens. Or the piles of gifts from well-meaning acquaintances that usually amount to a heap of useless plastic parts.

Two of our kids have birthdays this month, so we phased out the party for our youngest and instead we’re checking into The Great Wolf Lodge, where I intend to slip off  to the spa instead of the Canada Vortex.

Apparently I’m not the only one who disdains the kid party – below is a recent rant from Jerry Seinfeld on Letterman about this topic.

Kind of ironic to hear 50- and 60-something guys talking about toddler parties and bouncy houses.

---Allison

Internet TV: Always On

Online television has taken over from actual television in our home. That's because we got rid of our cable connection (and our TV set), but there is so much available online that we barely miss the old broadcast box.

Online TV seems ubiquitous these days (and it's everywhere). I've been using Hulu.com to find programming, but this week a blog called "Connect With Your Teens Through Pop Culture and Technology" has turned me on to the TV site Blinkx Remote, which aggregates online TV broadcasts from all over and transmits them from its site.

Blinkx Remote has a staggering number of links to various programs, and even has a page dedicated to children's programming. "Spider-Man," "Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle" and "X-Men" are among the offerings, as well as some non-hyphenated shows.

I'm not going to wax nostalgic for the days of old-school TV because I like the time-shifting properties of the online product, and I don't need to pay for satellite, cable or a DVR. I'm seldom able to turn on "30 Rock" on Thursday nights, but it's always waiting for me online.

Of course, I know how to watch responsibly, and when to say when. I'm not sure I can say the same about our kids when "The Office" or "Chuck" are available 24/7. That's just something else to police in our home precinct.

---Greg