Filtering by Tag: POLITICS

When Children Grow Up Online, They Lose Their Private Lives

October 08, 2024  /  Susannah Breslin

The author at four

This past spring, I wrote an opinion essay about children and privacy. The essay was inspired by and informed by my memoir, Data Baby: My Life in a Psychological Experiment, in which I detailed how being a research subject from childhood to adulthood shaped me and changed the trajectory of my life. I submitted the essay to various outlets, but no one was interested in publishing it, so I’m publishing it here for the first time.

Today’s kids grow up online. From the first sonogram image posted to a parent’s Facebook profile to providing toddler content fodder for a mommy influencer’s TikTok account, Gen Z has never known what it is to have a private life. Without their knowledge or consent the most intimate moments of these children’s lives, embarrassing meltdowns and potty training scenes alike, have been shared, scrutinized, and commented upon by people they will never meet.

I know something of what it’s like to grow up without a sense of privacy. Not long after I was born, in the spring of 1968, my parents submitted an application for my enrollment in an exclusive “laboratory preschool” run by the University of California, Berkeley, where my father was a poetry professor. When I arrived at the Harold E. Jones Child Study Center for my first day of nursery school, I became one of over 100 Berkeley children in a groundbreaking, 30-year longitudinal study of personality that sought to answer a question: If you study a child, can you predict who that child will grow up to be?

Over three decades, my cohort and I were studied extensively. At the preschool, which had been designed for spying on children, researchers observed us from a hidden observation gallery overlooking the classroom and assessed us in testing rooms equipped with one-way mirrors and eavesdropping devices. After preschool, the cohort scattered to the winds, but our principal investigators continued following us. At Tolman Hall, a Brutalist building on the north side of campus that housed the Department of Psychology, we were evaluated at key development stages. Our school report cards were analyzed. Our parents were interviewed. We were studied at home and in an RV that had been turned into a mobile laboratory with a hidden compartment in the rear from which one researcher looked on as another researcher evaluated us.

In the early years, I didn’t know I was being studied. Eventually, I learned I was part of an important study. In the beginning, my parents consented for me. When I got older, I consented for myself. I liked being studied. At home, my English professor parents were preoccupied with work, and I spent a lot of time alone in my room entertaining myself. In an experiment room, I was the center of attention. My intellectual parents were emotionally distant. The close attention paid to me by a researcher sitting across the table from me felt a lot like love.

From its first chapter, my life was an open book. As I understood it, my private life was not my own but something to be offered up willingly to science in service of enlightening humanity. In my mind, being a human lab rat was my destiny. Over time, our lives would inform over 100 books and scientific papers. The study would shed new light on how people become who they are, report that adult political orientation can be predicted from toddlerhood, and prove that, to some degree, you can foresee who a child will grow up to be.

According to the observer effect, the act of observation changes that which is being observed. Without a doubt, being studied changed my life. It made me feel like I mattered when my parents didn’t; its researchers’ keen interest in my life story played a role in shaping me into the writer I would become. When I was in my early thirties, the study ended, and in hindsight I can see I felt a bit lost without it. Who was I without my overseers watching over me?

I think about my experiences as a research subject when I think about Gen Z, the pioneering generation that is coming of age publicly. They are unwitting research subjects in a global-scale psychological experiment, one in which they are human guinea pigs and the unanswered question is: How will growing up in the public eye shape their identities? After all, this generation’s overseers are not kindly researchers who want to understand human nature but Big Tech billionaires who have fine-tuned their algorithms to not simply study their youngest users but to guide their choices, mold their senses of self, steer their minds.

According to a 2023 Gallup survey, the average American teenager spends 4.8 hours a day on social media. In January, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg engaged in senatorial theater, suggesting the company was undertaking steps to reduce the potential for harms caused by social media on teens. In his State of the Union Address in March, President Joe Biden made a brief reference to his goal to “Pass bipartisan privacy legislation to protect our children online.”

For kids, it may be too late to save what they’ve lost already: a private life.

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tags / DATA BABY, RESEARCH, PRIVACY, NONFICTION, BOOKS, JOURNALISM, OPINION, PERSONAL, TECH, POLITICS

Ignore the Man in the White House

November 09, 2020  /  Susannah Breslin

I was somewhat surprised this tweet was as popular as it was—liked by a couple hundred and tweeted by a few dozen. It’s the basic best practices strategy in dealing with bullies: ignore them into nonexistence. I really admired Biden’s Delaware speech and realized afterwards that it was charmingly and largely absent the looming lummox that is Trump. This is how you disempower people who have no real power. You render them invisible. Trump has been annihilated.

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tags / TWITTER, POLITICS, STRATEGY

A Trump Rally

October 30, 2020  /  Susannah Breslin

In October 2016, I attended a Trump rally in Naples, Florida. I was and am not a Trump fan, I vote Democrat all the way, but I was curious to see what was so compelling about this cartoonish figure. I figured this was my last opportunity to see him in this way. There was no chance he’d win the presidential election the following month. As I recall, the rally was held in a field. As I walked toward the gathering crowd, an older white man looked at me and said: “Isn’t this great?” Out front, a Black man was selling Trump-themed T-shirts. Eventually, the president-who-surely-wouldn’t-be made a dramatic arrival in a helicopter. Most of the attendees, largely white, hooted in excitement. Finally, Trump made his way to the stage. He was taller than I expected, and while I find his politics utterly repellent, I could see there was something compelling about him. His strongman delivery offered comfort to people who perceived themselves as weak and under threat and wanted to protect their way of life, a way of life based on the exploitation of others and the devaluation of people of color. They didn’t think of themselves as white supremacists, but they were. Trump appealed to their closeted desires: for a man in a blue suit wearing an invisible Klu Klux Klan robe to restore their place in the world, one in which anyone who wasn’t white had no right to exist, to be heard, to vote. At a certain point, the attendees started chanting: “Lock her up!” The only thing more apparent than their racism was their misogyny. Eventually, I left. It was a weird window into an awful world, but surely it wouldn’t lead to a presidency. Yet, here we are. Four years later, the country has been turned topsy-turvy, by a sociopath. Here’s hoping for an empath as our next president.

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tags / POLITICS, PHOTOGRAPHS, JOURNALISM

Ratioed

November 26, 2018  /  Susannah Breslin

Buy "The Tumor" — my short story that’s been called "a masterpiece of short fiction."

tags / TWITTER, POLITICS, ANIMALS