Growing Up Online

The Frontline PBS film “Growing up Online” produced and directed by Rachel Dretzin and John Maggio is about how involved the internet is in today’s generation. The film includes both what parents and teachers think and what children think of the addiction to the internet. The narrator introduces the movie, “[a] peek inside the very public private lives of kids Growing Up Online.” A very public private life because children are posting information others would think is too personal to be public and for everyone else to know. Anne Collier, author of MySpace Unraveled states about the internet, “It's not going to go away. It's not a passing fad. And nobody's really in charge.” No one is in charge of the internet and that is what is so darn scary to parents, teachers and other concerned adults. The internet is so daunting because it is so accessible to anyone (including pedophiles and other criminals) and can access personal information about anybody and use the information in a hurtful and wrongful way.

The internet is almost an escape from reality, in a sense that, in one moment you can access the alter ego online. You can have popularity and be accepted, and have online fame and countless “friends.” The internet is a way for teenagers to display their identity dramatically. Are teenagers displaying too much and too dramatically? That question is on every parent and teacher’s mind. For some parent – child relationships their trust in each other was lost because of how the child used the internet in a particular way to get noticed, such as online relationships, secrets, and overexposure of their bodies in pictures. With the internet, bullying doesn’t just stop at the playground it continues behind closed doors online. Cyber bullying can drive a child off the edge of safety and the feeling of not being secure in your own home is terrifying especially if the child feels as if nobody will understand.

One big factor outside the home environment is the use of the internet at school. Teachers have to try and keep up with this rising generation and the internet. They have to incorporate it into their teaching to reach the student such as the use of Smart Boards and podcasting. In order to reach the students better with these additions teachers almost have to become like entertainers to the students sine the internet is entertainment.

If I were to write a story on the impact of the internet and digital media on my own life, I would write about how confident children think they are when they share their lives on the internet. Since most parents don’t know this world of the internet as well as their children do they have become more intimidated and scared for their children. The internet is a new method for criminals to have access to young and unaware children and this is what parents are afraid of. Children claim that they know to avoid these certain online predators. However I have found that online predators are not direct in what they do online. They do not directly ask for children’s personal information, they are more clever than that. They first befriend you, and since children young and of adolescent age desire to be accepted it is very easy for online predators. And as for adolescent children claiming that it is their person and private life and your parents should mind their own business, your parents are minding their own business! It is the parents responsibility to supervise their children and it is the children’s responsibility to listen and to be attentive to the vulnerability of the internet.