I tend to play down the effect of computers on kids, probably because my oldest is only 6. But she likes to do stuff on the computer -- take care of her Webkinz, check out PBS websites. I'm fooling myself if I think that's where it all begins and ends. Sooner than I know it, she'll be all over IMing, and Facebook and whatever else will no doubt come along to grab her attention, ask for her personal details, dumb down her education, etc.
Tonight, a PBS Frontline airs the documentary Growing Up Online, which looks at all the different angles of kids and the Internet and their parents who are often in the background feeling (as I do) fully in control but actually are not.
They tell the story of Jessica Hunter, a shy 14-year-old who reinvented herself online as "Autumn Edows": ... an alternative goth artist and model who posted provocative photos of herself on the Web, and fast developed a cult following. “I just became this whole different person,” Jessica tells FRONTLINE. “I didn’t feel like myself, but I liked the fact that I didn’t feel like myself. I felt like someone completely different. I felt like I was famous.”
The program also covers what parents fear most online: sexual predators. Also cyberbullying, and online communities that might not be in the best interest of your vulnerable child -- tips for staying thin from anorexics or ways to commit suicide for depressed teens. They film also hits more banal seeming stuff (incomparison to all the nakedness and injury and covert seduction), like how much easier it is to cheat on homework, how computer use might interrupt real learning, that kind of thing.
These are the kinds of things I'd much rather bury my head in the sand over, since the options for dealing with it seems so few: get rid of the computer, raise kid on remote island. Here's how a law expert sees it.
“You have a generation faced with a society with fundamentally different properties thanks to the Internet,” says Danah Boyd, a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School. “We can turn our backs and say, ‘This is bad,’ or, ‘We don’t want a world like this.’ It’s not going away. So instead of saying that this is terrible, instead of saying, ‘Stop MySpace; stop Facebook; stop the Internet,’ it’s a question for us of how we teach ourselves and our children to live in a society where these properties are fundamentally a way of life. This is public life today.”
I think I'll watch the program. On PBS tonight, check local listings. And remember, many Frontline episodes can be watched online at the PBS website.
