Addicted to the automated control of children online?

Parents are increasingly concerned about the risks their children run online. They fear their child is at risk from: talking with strangers, accessing inappropriate content, becoming 'addicted' and addling their brains. They are urged to become their own expert in their child's media use, and in the emerging media choices with which their child might be faced. They are encouraged to be hypervigilant and to delegate many monitoring and control functions to a range of automated tools which restrict, filter and report. But does this automation of parental concern protect children? Recent research endorses the ways in which parents used to approach this challenge, before the advent of automated 'helicopter' parenting and the latest scare stories about 13 year olds on hook-up apps. In simpler days, when ACMA conducted their 2007 study of Australian families online, parents were supported in their roles as guides and influencers of their children's behaviours. But that investigation was conducted at the tipping point where public debate became increasingly impacted by firstly Howard's family-friendly filter and then Conroy's mandatory filter at the level of the ISP. These were soon followed by the burgeoning availability of parental controls offering care-givers the illusory impression that they could automate cotrol of what and when (and to some extent where) their child could consume media. Now, in addition to legacy media guilting parents who prefer to negotiate on these issues, pro-automate parents put pressure on their non-compliant peers for providing the weak link in the control chain. It only takes one unfiltered access point to corrupt an entire peer group ... This paper examines the costs and benefits of an everyday automated approach to 'keeping children safe online', using original ethnographic research and integrating these data with other studies.status: publishe