Facebook, youtube, text messaging. Online personas. Friends met through friends of friends or a friend's cousin. What does this mean for us? Is the world getting smaller? Are your children inherently at more risk if they spend more time online on these social networking sites?
I tend to side with 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 know, it's easy for me to say... I'm obviously a proponent of technology. I also don't have a teenager at home yet. It's still pretty easy for me to limit access to online games such as pbskids.org for my four year old son.
So I'm recommending that you watch a Frontline special, Growing Up Online, on Tuesday, January 22nd on PBS at 9 pm. Hear from experts with varying opinions and from teens with different experiences. Watch this with your teen as a way to start discussing how s/he spends time online. It's a start to learning about the online world. At least it can be a conversation starter, if you haven't yet had that conversation.
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