Sexting: skinny dipping for the digital age

Time was, I am told, when teenagers would occasionally gather at the local swimming hole, shuck their duds, and jump in the creek. I’m thinking, as I write this from my advancing chronological vantage, that most of the participants turned out OK. They re-donned their duds and became doctors, lawyers, and farmers.

Unfortunately, for most of our young, there is no creek, no break in the pond-side shrubbery on which they can hang the trappings of proper society and share a few illicit moments of rebellion with selected compatriots.

The bushes have been cut back, the trees cleared, to build houses on the new private property, with locked doors and window shades pulled tightly against their frames. Inside the shingles and vinyl siding, away from the prying eyes of passersby, we go online and post messages, secure in the knowledge that only those we intend to see them will know what we wrote.

It’s a strange quirk of human-ness that we can titter at a video posted by someone we do not know, and not realize that the pictures we posted for our best friend to see are equally public to viewers in Latvia, California, our arch enemy two classrooms down the hall, or the school principal’s secretary.

In one school district, a teacher who discovers a student using a cell phone for Sexting — the new word for texting that includes pictures of admittedly inappropriate visual aids — may give the student a choice: have the phone destroyed, or face prosecution for child pornography.

I have been told that when the Polaroid camera came out, and kids discovered the film didn’t have to go to the drugstore to be processed, they did the same thing with “inappropriate” pictures of themselves. What is different is that back in the day, only those to whom the photographer actually handed the picture got to ogle its depiction.

When I load my Facebook account, I am treated to messages from friends, pictures of their family outings, and other innocent postings. I also am suddenly privy to comments about their postings from their other friends — people I do not know and likely will never meet. I detect within their comments inside jokes, underlying meanings I am not meant to decipher.

Our silliness and personal confidentialities are on the wall, like graffiti painted on a roadside boulder, except the spray-painted rock does not include the name and address of the artist. Unlike the Rust-Oleum-covered boulder, words and pictures posted to the online networks cannot be easily, if at all, deleted.

LinkedIn, a social networking site populated primarily by upwardly mobile professionals, has no delete function on its mailbox. One can remove past emails only from view, by archiving them.

I have accounts on Facebook and Twitter. I still have one on MySpace; I tried to get rid of it and could not. Once you sign up, you are permanently a member.

Facebook recently went through some controversy when it altered its rules to declare its ownership of everything its users posted on the site. It has backed off on that rule, but I would not count on it not returning when people become a little more complacent about the public-ness of the site.

Ironically, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, YouTube and several other popular gathering places have become the digital equivalent of a pre-historic community dwelling with paper-thin walls. Both provide the barest illusion of privacy. Candidates for public office share space with hormone-laden teens in their quest for attention and passing of not-so-private messages, still pictures and videos.

The sites are useful. They are wonderful meeting places, fostering, at their best, a modern equivalent of pen-pals. They are places where we may share the joys of our lives with many recipients, at the touch of a single button. Media outlets and politicians may post features and viewpoints with a click of a mouse.

But how do we separate note-passing from child pornography, indiscretion from victimization?

I am not certain the correct way to do that; it is different for each child, each situation and each parent. Our parental job — and school staff are surrogate parents — is to somehow stand hidden at the base of the picket fence, our hearts in our throats, while our children carefully balance themselves in their teetering walk from childhood to adulthood.

And when they lose occasionally their balance, we are there to catch them before they splatter on the ground. They need to know we will do that, even while they plaintively wail, “Mommy, please! I want to do it myself.”

I am certain the incorrect way is to smash their cell phones and label them pornographers.

Readers may contact John Messeder at jmesseder@comcast.net.

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21st Century Pen Pals

I am on Facebook, one of the better known “social web sites.” Users of Facebook get to designate certain people as “friends.” Mostly it is simply a place to leave each other messages.

My site has remained mostly dormant for the several months I have had it. My real friends generally communicate with me more personally: with regular email, text messaging or a slap on the head.

Then came a note in my email: “Bobbi added you as a friend on Facebook. We need to confirm that you know Bobbi in order for you to be friends on Facebook.”

At first, I thought I didn’t know Bobbi, but then I read the next line: “We used to work on the Buckroe Rescue Squad together!!!”

About 25 years ago, I served on a community rescue squad. Bobbi and I attended the same class to become Emergency Medical Technicians. I drove a motorcycle, and her mom allowed me to take her 17-year-old daughter to class on the bike. Mom’s permission was not eagerly granted. I promised to be extra careful.

Bobbi and I often sat in the hospital parking lot after class and discussed matters of import, such as why choices were made on who received treatment and who didn’t if there was a serious accident at the nearby nuclear power plant.

We talked about religion, too, although not at first. Whenever I would bring it up, Bobbi would shy away. Finally, I asked her why.

I was Catholic, she reminded me, and Catholics generally do not discuss religion with Jehovah’s Witnesses. We finally agreed that neither would try to convert the other, but that if either did convert, the other likely would get extra points in Heaven for providing something the converted one had been seeking.

We crewed together on the ambulance — my wife, Bobbi and me. We went on our first heart attack call together. The man was driving a lawn tractor when he expired. We and the medics did what we could, but it had been written in the Big Book that we would not be successful.

After more than five years on the squad, I moved away, and lost contact with Bobbi, and the rest of the squad members.

And here she was in my email, linked to my Facebook site.

I tell that story to tell this one: Like many others of approximately my age, I have concerns about where my information will be used, and how, as I travel around the Internet.

On the other hand, I had, in my younger days, a pen pal from Lewes, Sussex, England. I drew her name in a high school history class and we corresponded for several years. Eventually, Prue married and had a couple of boys, I joined the Navy, got married and had two children of my own, and we stopped writing.

That was my introduction to someone from a homeland distant from my own.

As an amateur radio operator, I conversed with people from other countries. In college, in the early days of Internet, I talked with still more.

In the Navy, I traveled to places about which I had only read, met some really nice people, and began to wonder what would happen if Soviet sailors and U.S. sailors could visit a port together, instead of one waiting for the other to leave before having a beer with the local lasses.

My 10-year-old granddaughter asked me recently to help her find a pen pal. Kass has a computer. She would like access to MySpace and Facebook and email. I would like her to have those means of learning about other people – but that would involve strong parental and teacher oversight to help her stay clear of mayhem. Unfortunately, it’s easier to prohibit access than to guide her past some pretty nasty dangers.

I suspect there are ways for teachers in widely separated classrooms to arrange connections between their students. There are, in the immediacy of computerized pen pals, some wonderful opportunities.

Had it not been for the Internet, Bobbi would not have found me. Maybe more old friends will find me. A message the other day told me my sister is following me on Twitter. One day, someone I’ve never met will become a valued Facebook friend.

There are other sites for what now is called “social networking.” The Internet can be a pretty nice tool for keeping in touch with people we know, and for getting in touch with people we don’t. With appropriate guidance from parents and teachers, it could be a wonderful tool to help the younger set learn about the rest of the world.

,Readers may contact John Messeder at jmesseder@comcast.net.,

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