Cybercitizens of the World Unite

Our children are inheriting a digital world that did not exist a mere twenty years ago.

Websites and virtual worlds are now catering to children under five and the average age of a child in Europe getting her first cell phone is just eight and a half years old. Children often surpass their parents and teachers in the adoption of technology and in joining the exponentially growing online meeting places, services and sites.

Western civilization has a collective memory of what it means to be a citizen stretching back to ancient Greece. We teach our children about rights and responsibilities, of obligations to the community and, even in our cynical times, of the honor and respect that results from doing our civic duty. But we are still learning what it means to teach our children to be a citizen of the digital world.

So how can we translate these concepts to our emerging and constantly evolving digital world? What lessons must we adults learn before we are in a position to teach this generation of digital natives what is expected of them? Can Athens and aspects of the "polis" be a model for cyberspace?

The answers may lie in the experience of developing tools, rules and public policies in the field of online safety. These efforts began in the earliest days of the World Wide Web back in the mid-1990s and have evolved beyond crude (literally) word blocking and URL black-listing to sophisticated family safety settings on cell phones, search engines and controls embedded into the operating system itself. What has also progressed is the way media literacy is conceived and taught -- linking to the latest research on actual harm and how children and teens actually behave online. We have grown into a society that is aware of the perils of the Internet, striving to teach our children how to protect themselves.

With many communities experiencing the opportunities of broadband for the first time, there is an urgent need to put programs in place that encourage safe and responsible online use and which demonstrate the rights that cybercitizens should expect and demand. Remaining safe from harm -- be it physical, psychological or reputational harm -- should be a fundamental right. Rights of privacy, of speech and expression are of equal concern and will require an informed and vigilant citizenry to claim and maintain these basic freedoms.

While demanding these liberties, we must also accept new responsibilities. Governments must provide reasonable oversight and support, fund research, promote educational messages, and craft reasonable laws, while avoiding a Chinese-style censorship regime. Law enforcement will need to be enhanced in order to deal with the highly sophisticated ways criminals are exploiting online weaknesses to taking advantage of user's personal information, their bank accounts and worse. The online industry must step up and support self-regulatory efforts to protect kids from the worst of the web, to develop more stringent privacy controls and to educate their customers on how to stay safe on the Internet. We need tech-savvy teachers who can not only use the new technology in the classroom, but can also integrate the technology the kids bring to school - particularly web-enabled cell phones. We must empower parents to talk with their children about their online lives, to become familiar with the technologies and the social networking sites their kids visit and to set house rules for their use. Integration of these technologies will allow for the creation of responsible cybercitizens who can continue these valuable lessons far into the future.

Above all else, we need to foster resiliency in our children and help them to make wise choices about the content they seek and post online; about who they contact and who they allow to contact them; and how they conduct themselves on the Internet. Yes, we must protect them from the worst of the web, but more importantly, we need to empower and encourage our kids so that as they inherit this new world, they make sense of and inhabit it in ways their elders could hardly imagine.

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