The Feral User
When did we become responsible for “civilizing” feral
users, and why d'esn’t anyone realize the huge
responsibility that has been thrust on higher
education IT staff?
If you’ve read Lord of the Flies or Tarzan, or ever
heard about the Wolf Boy in anthropology class you’re
familiar with the spectrum of mythology regarding what
young people without adults are capable of getting up
to. Tarzan, of course, was remarkably civilized for
having been raised by nonhuman animals but those kids
in Lord of the Flies were scary.
We’ve almost got a Lord of the Flies situation with
our freshman class and its cyberculture. They’ve
grown up with access to IT and the Internet and
have acculturated in a shadowy, underground cyberworld
that is not under adult supervision. And most of them
have been exposed to little or no “civilizing” processes
with regard to their computer usage – until they come to
campus.
Beloit College published the annual Beloit College
Mindset List (http://www.beloit.edu/~pubaff/releases/
mindset_2007.html). It makes headlines each fall with
items intended to educate college staff about incoming
freshmen. Items like: “Bert & Ernie are old enough to
be their parents”; “Computers have always fit in their
backpacks”; “They have always had a PIN number”; and
“There have never been dress codes in restaurants.”
One item I am not sure that I agree with is
““Ctrl + Alt + Del” is as basic as ‘ABC.’” Some of
them know that, but others just hit the off button
and hold it down until everything stops. And that’s
symptomatic of a really huge societal problem. They
don’t care about hitting the off button, because if
the computer breaks their parents will fix it for
them – they don’t see the costs of that. Ditto with
the situation on campus.
As recent news items have made clear, our incoming
students have an expectation of state-of-the-art
connectivity and access. Many of them have spent
years by now going home after school and spending
hours online doing e-mail, chat, surfing, and also
talking with friends on cell phones, simultaneously.
They’ve lived a chunk of their lives inside their
computers, but who have they been learning social
behavioral norms from? Basically, no one but their
peers. So we’ve got something that sometimes looks
like a Lord of the Flies situation.
Parents aren’t teaching them, d’oh! Sure, a handful
of conscientious parents spend time showing kids
computer basics – more likely they go to their kids
when they get a new toy and ask the kids to learn
how to use it and show them. Few parents spend any
time at all monitoring their teenagers’ online
behaviors and connections and those who do are
largely frustrated and lack a real grasp of what
g'es on. In my own household, we had a rule that
computers capable of going online had to be in a
room adjacent to and within sight of where the
parents spend their time, and our teenagers stuck
to that. That let me occasionally get a glimpse into
the teenager cyberworld, but only a glimpse . . .
and what I saw was often scary.
How about their teachers in middle school and high
school? What a joke! The K-12 world is pathetically
hopeless about IT, and especially about student
usage of the Internet. There is a complete lack
of funding, teacher training, or focus. Even those
school systems which are giving students laptops
– every 6th grader in Michigan is getting a laptop,
for example – don’t really know what to do with them.
Teachers and K-12 administrators almost universally
find it impossible to deal with because it is
uncontrollable, and K-12 is all about control.
It’s no wonder that we find students with a completely
different morality with regard to P-to-P file sharing
and other related intellectual property issues.
And that we have students who think nothing of
writing worms or viruses that will cause (mostly)
adults problems. I could tell you stories about
how they harass, stalk, and emotionally attack
each other using IT that would curl your hair,
but that’s for another article.
So, we get these kids and we – for reasons that
have to do with education, research, and the desire
to attract the students to our campuses in the first
place – give them an even better cyber playground
than they had before. And, of course, after being
on vacation all summer with even less supervision,
doing all sorts of unsafe computing, they come back
and we have to create the IT equivalent of a cyber
health strike force to get them healthy again.
We’re just at the point where a handful of schools
have a few hours, maybe, of required sit-in-lecture
indoctrination about not stealing music files and
not clicking on unknown attachments in e-mail. The
good news is that we may have reached some sort of
critical threshold this academic year where the
student body is as a whole cognizant that safe
computing is important because it affects their
ability to be connected and do the things they’ve
become used to doing.
Let’s take advantage of that. We were forced into
a huge, focused outreach and we spent a lot of
money we really didn’t have. But we’re going to
save a lot more money if we spend more on educating
these students about cyber responsibility. And it
may even be that we have a society-wide responsibility
to do so.
The fact is that graduating college students comfortable
with information technology tools and their safe use,
is as important for the future of modern civilization
as graduating primary school students who can read
well. In either case it’s “literacy,” and important!
But no one’s doing it. Their parents didn’t. Their
schools didn’t. The formal curriculum at our colleges
and universities won’t.
Yet we need them to learn about how to be responsible
participants in cyberspace – and so do the companies
and organizations that will be employing them when
they are graduates of our institutions. But we
aren’t requiring classes in computer user behavior
and we’re not likely to. Our institutions, despite
the swerve in recent years away from liberal
education, have not shown an inclination to spend
a lot of time teaching practical things like personal
hygiene or its cyber-equivalent.
Recent students have shown that our institutional
leaders, even in difficult financial times, think
investments in IT are important. Recent columns
in this series have made the point that we need
to take more responsibility for things like
providing our students with antiviral software.
Maybe we need to do even more, we being IT staff.
Maybe we need to consciously accept responsibility
for taking in our freshman class of feral users
each year and within four years turn them into
responsible cybercitizens.
