teens online

I think that this frontline special was a great wake-up call to parents about how kids are using the Internet. This new medium has created several new positive and negative influences for teens especially. I cannot believe how fast the internet has changed our culture. This generation uses the internet for everything from research to satisfying social needs that go unfulfilled in our own lives. Friends are contacting each other through social networking sites rather than meeting face-to-face and we are also using this medium to create and maintain our most private relationships. All teens need to be informed of the dangers and precaution they should take online but I did however think this tv spot was overblown. I found this article from the MIT Technological Review and felt it presented some good points about online use:

"For almost a decade now, the debate about youth and new media technologies has been polarized around two conflicting mythslet's call them the Myth of the Columbine Generation and the Myth of the Digital Generation. The first is driven by fear, the other hope, but both distort the reality kids and parents must negotiate in the online world, and both exaggerate the centrality of digital media in children's lives.Parents, educators, and policymakers can get whiplash trying to respond to the competing pull of these two myths. One pulls us toward wiring every classroom in the country so that kids may enjoy the benefits of digital access, the other mandates filtering programs in school and library computers since kids can't be trusted once they log on."

The major problem here seems to be about finding a balance. How much is too much and how far is too far when the internet is concerned? As a culture, we have profoundly mixed views about how much adolescents should be protected from adult realities and almost uniform agreement that children should be protected from pornography. I think a lot of responsibility of how much teens use the internet should be placed on parents.

Teens today face a public life with unimaginably wide possibly for publicity. The internet opens up a whole new world of possibility. We can basically advertise ourselves for friendship, for jobs, and anything else we desire. Because of this, I do no thins it is accidental that teens live in a culture infatuated with celebrity, the “reality” presented by reality TV and the highlypublicized dramas (such as that between socialites Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie).