- Parents’ Concerns
19
measure of parental responsibility and were frustrated to find they were lacking,
Israeli parents constructed their children as experts to start with, and seemed only too
happy to regard the children as responsible to their Internet acts.
And so even though the survey resonated with US conventional constructions of the
Internet and adopted a notion of concern as its central descriptive framework, it did
not impose this notion on Israelis; rather, it allowed them to suggest alternative
constructions and to describe alternative relationships between individuals and
technologies. Future work, however, could renegotiate the benefits of reliability with
the gains of validity and consider either adjustments in the survey that would resonate
with local discourses and practices, or survey construction that is from the start more
responsive to cultural variation.
Seeking to account for what he conceived as adolescent girls’ inadequate
understanding of privacy, Merten (1999) resorted to an implicit developmental theory
and suggested that as they grow older—as they become acculturated—girls
distinguish better the private from that which is publicly open. Friedman (1997), at
the same time, warned that computer technology makes it difficult, if not impossible
for adolescents to acknowledge privacy and to be aware of its violation. Should
parent-child differences in the construction of the information that ought to remain
unavailable to the market be seen as reflecting developmental differences that will
eventually disappear? Are they the inevitable result of the pervasive use of computer-
mediated communication technologies? Or are they reflecting the growth of cultures
that are distinctive in their relationships with the market, as this study suggests?
Comparative longitudinal research will be able to provide answers to these questions.
Convention