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Tuesday, January 22, 2008
Not law - On PBS tonight: "Growing Up Online"
The ILB has seen the legal implications of these societal changes reflected in online free speech cases, internet predators, cyberbullying, privacy and reputation implications, etc.
Some quotes from the PBS press release:
In Growing Up Online, airing Tuesday, January 22, 2008, at 9 P.M. ET on PBS (check local listings), FRONTLINE takes viewers inside the private worlds that kids are creating online, raising important questions about just how radically the Internet is transforming the experience of childhood. “It’s just this huge shift in which the Internet and the digital world was something that belonged to adults, and now it’s something that really is the province of teenagers, “ says C.J. Pascoe, a Ph.D. scholar with the University of California, Berkeley’s Digital Youth Project. “They’re able to have a private space, even while they’re still at home. They’re able to communicate with their friends and have an entire social life outside of the purview of their parents without actually having to leave the house.”As more and more kids begin to grow up online, parents are finding themselves on the outside looking in, struggling to remain relevant and engaged in their kids’ lives. “I remember being 11; I remember being 13; I remember being 16, and I remember having secrets,” one mother says. “But it’s really hard when it’s the other side.”
At school, teachers are trying to figure out how to reach a generation that no longer reads books or newspapers. “We can’t possibly expect the learner of today to be engrossed by someone who speaks in a monotone voice with a piece of chalk in their hand,” one school principal says. “We almost have to be entertainers,” a longtime history teacher tells FRONTLINE. “If you look at the advertising world and the media world that they live in, they consume so much media. We have to cut through that cloud of information around them, cut through that media and capture their attention.”
Fear of online predators has led teachers and parents to also focus heavily on keeping kids safe online. But many children think these fears are misplaced. * * *
“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.”
Posted by Marcia Oddi on January 22, 2008 06:12 AM
Posted to General News