‘Be [Net] Alert,but Not Alarmed’? Regulating the Parents of Generation MSN

Abstract

The proliferation of net safety discourses in recent years in Australia, the United States and the United Kingdom situate the parent at the centre of the family home as the monitor and protector of children and teenagers — Generation MSN — while they ideally acquire skills to become responsible net citizens. This paper considers such discourses to analyse their gendered nature, their underlying assumptions about teenage users and their models of ‘globalised’ parenting. It argues that, in the drive to create and regulate a ‘safe’ internet for young people, such discourses actively produce a new version, for the twenty-first century, of the good parent — for which should be read ‘monitoring mum’.