Babies of 2014: Questions from crib to college

Here is a list of select questions that babies born in 2014 will ask their parents as they grow up, courtesy of the Beloit College Mindset Lists.

9. Privacy

Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras/The Guardian/AP
Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor, says his "mission's already accomplished" after leaking NSA secrets that have caused a reassessment of U.S. surveillance policies. This photo provided by The Guardian Newspaper in London shows National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden, in Hong Kong on June 9.

"Why is that old guy Edward Snowden living on a boat in the middle of the ocean?"

Today, digital interactions such as online chats, phone conversations, and video conferences are all susceptible to being monitored for the sake of stamping out nefarious content in the interest of national security. Or so we are told. We expect that the babies born in 2014 will have little to no digital privacy, at least not in the way we define it today. 

9 of 10

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

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