Jacob
Drew Kirkman🧵: Back when I was in high school, the prevailing sentiment among my fellow students was “be careful, they can see everything you do on school computers” and basically just being completely on edge about the whole thing. Here’s my take, and I invite discussion below.
Since then, I spent nine years as the “they” my fellow students were referring to working in K-12 education, and I think there’s one thing a lot of folks fail to understand even into adulthood and real life: in that role, you really could not grasp just how little I cared. Most people in roles like that don’t have time to be the fun police.
You had to be doing something monumentally stupid to get my attention. A few kids did, and I acted to protect the integrity of the systems and data I was tasked to maintain. But if you’re not doing anything that realistically poses any risk to yourself or anyone else, knock yourself out. The worst I could do was re-image your computer if you messed it up.
By and large, in a scenario where the capability exists for someone else to see what you’re doing, outside of extreme cases of surveillance capitalism, no one cares enough to look. There is a psychological concept called the “spotlight effect”, and it is VERY REAL and VERY PREVALENT among the human population.
There is never a simple answer to a complex issue. Ever. It doesn’t help that humans always want simple answers. It gets dangerous when people ignore complexity and nuance in pursuit of a simple answer, because someone will come up with a simple answer to fill the vacuum that is almost always wrong… or at the very least, leaves out a lot of important details.
Incoherent word vomit over.
Sean Randall@kirkman as a teacher who landed in teaching via a route of sysadmin, I've sadly found telling the students their online lives are too dull and boring for me to take an active interest doesn't always go down to well. :(
@cachondo Yeah, kids like attention. Eventually they’ll realize that attention seeking behaviors sometimes attract the attention of someone they’d rather not have.