Computers, Society, and Nature

(written by Intro to GIS student, E. H.)
Growing up in New Hampshire I always watched the Boston news stations. A particular announcement came on every night before the ten o’clock news. It was a public service announcement that said “It is ten o’clock, Boston; Do you know where your children are?” This announcement was to remind parents to be active participants in their children’s lives and know where they were going and what they were doing. This question of “do you know where your children are?” has taken on a whole new meaning in recent years. In North America, most cell phone companies have created tracking services. The cell phones are equipped with GPS locators so that parents can watch where their geolocated children are in real time on a map on their own cell phones. It doesn’t stop there. New tools for tracking children are coming out everyday. The GPS nanny is hidden within a wristwatch given to kids by their parents. This device not only locates the child and warns the parent if they stray too far from them, but it also has the option to be equipped with a video camera, speaker, and microphone, as well as the ability to monitor the heart rate, blood pressure, and body temperature of the child. In recent years in Japan, several high-tech advances have come out for monitoring children, including built-in GPS locators in school uniforms and backpacks. Between April and July of 2006, a prototype for a child tracking system was tested in Yokohama Japan. One hundred and eighty-eight children in the region were tagged with wireless IC tags which transmitted radio signals to 27 sensors. If a child walked within 30 meters of a sensor an email was sent to their parents. This technology has been used in private schools to monitor when children arrive at and leave school and where they are during the time between leaving school and reaching home.

With the advent of all of this technology for pinpointing the exact locations and physical states of children at all times, one begins to wonder where the line should be drawn. When does tracking become overstepping boundaries and violating children’s rights? More importantly through this technology are parents distancing themselves from those they wish to keep safe? Are children no longer to be trusted? The phrase, “do you know where your children are?” no longer means “do you talk to your children and know who their friends are?” but rather “have you checked your laptop lately to see that the house they have entered is in the right part of town?” What happened to parents relying on themselves to protect their children? Have they become so busy and so wrapped up in themselves, that they can not take the time to walk children to the bus in the morning and pick them up at the end of the day or arrange for someone they trust to do so?

The recent increase in the fear of not knowing where children are at all times is not one that should be fixed with technology and tracking devices but rather with taking responsibility for kids and being good parents. Relying on technology to satisfy these fears is like taking cold medicine when one has a virus. Cold medicine will relieve the symptoms, but in doing so it prevents the body from actually fighting the virus and fixing the problem. In the same way, the use of technology to calm fears of where children are relieves the symptom but does not solve the problem of the break-down of communication with and the lack of active participation in the lives of children. I feel it is high time we that take a step back to evaluate what the real problem is and take steps toward solving it. This is not a matter having time to talk to children; it is a matter of making time, a matter of parents making their children a priority in their lives and not just another thing they must keep track of and monitor.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 3rd, 2007 at 1:58 am and is filed under geographic information systems, surveillance. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.