Watch this interesting video that shares a lot about how fast social networking has moved into our world and how rapidly it’s changing the way people interact, work, and play.
Go to the Socialnomics website to see sources of the information, statistics, and data.
You may need to turn down the music.
Check out Is the Virtual World Good For the “Real” One? in the February 23, 2011 Huffington Post. The article, by Joseph Kahane, describes a longitudinal study focused on the amount of time that young people (age 18 – 29) spend online. Researchers wondered whether time in the virtual world may be keeping young people from paying enough attention to the tangible needs of the real world.
Kahane, who currently chairs the MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Youth and Participatory Politics, describes some interesting findings and concludes, ” In short, the virtual world can be good for the “real” one. There are forms of online activity that can give youth civic and political engagement a much-needed boost. We need to fully tap this potential.”
Read the entire article.
If you haven’t read the article, GWU Launches Online Prep School, appearing in the January 22, 2011 Washington Post, check it out. The piece, by reporter Daniel de Vise describes the digital school, but he also explains how a dramatic shift — toward digital learning — is occurring world of education as more and more people take computer-based online learning courses. The article also examines whether online learning is a good learning tool in the world of adolescents. The jury is still out on this question, because of the strong organizational skills that are required to complete an online course. You can visit the GWU Online High School website and also the Stanford University Online High School website.
In today’s digital world groups increasingly troll the Internet, depositing easily available and intriguing materials — music, posters, jokes, cartoons, and stories — whose sole purpose is to introduce growing children to hate. Over recent years this readily available propaganda, designed expressly to appeal to teen sarcasm, edgy humor, and musical preferences, strives to look like any other funny or absurd digital content a student might casually discover. Except that it’s not funny.
It’s also not something for parents to scare. The simple fix is for parents and educators to talk with children, mentoring them, helping them learn to evaluate, guiding them to develop an eagle eye that identifies and filters hateful content — exactly what you teach them to do with any other inappropriate content.
All of us — educators, parents, and especially adolescents — need to know how to recognize this type of information and how to alert others. Hate groups look for vulnerable pre-adolescents and teens from every socioeconomic group. The level of education in a child’s home and an emphasis on values of respect and acceptance may not make a difference if a child, during an especially needy, lonely, or stressful time or through an error in judgment, encounters a clever hate group tactic. Many children are simply attracted by absurdity, laughing at symbols they know little about. That’s also when a group may try, if it has even a bit of personal information, to encourage an adolescent to come back, laugh some more, and maybe even make a friend.
Hate groups have become more active and more visible since President Obama’s 2008 election, but these organizations, some quite small, have courted young people for years. An old, but still relevant Salon Magazine article, Web of Hate, described the problem as it existed on the Internet in 1998, providing a good background. The issue, however, is far more serious today.
The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) spends a considerable amount of its time and money tracking purveyors of hate. Its website features an interactive hate map and also provides first-rate resources that parents, teachers, and religious leaders can use when hateful content surfaces or when it’s necessary to actually fight recruitment tactics. The map, by the way, is an extraordinary teaching tool in itself, but so are the SPLC intelligence files such as this one on the Ku Klux Klan.
Read about the white power racist music industry and some of its recruitment strategies. In an article in the California-based, East Country Magazine, James McElroy, a chairman of the SPLC board comments:
We try to shine a little light on it. Hate is like a fungus under a rock. Shine a light and you can eradicate it.
Continue reading “Kids, Hate Groups, and the Internet: There’s So Much to Encounter!”
As the parent of a Brown University alum, I occasionally check the Brown Daily Herald, the engaging student newspaper that kept me connected during years when my child did not necessarily let me know what was happening. By reading the student newspaper I could find out who was speaking at the university, why certain important issues concerned Brown students, and what significant faculty research projects interested me. More importantly during that time, an amazing woman, academic superstar Ruth Simmons, Ph.D., assumed the presidency of the university, and from that moment on, there was never a dull moment, at least from my perspective, anywhere at Brown or in the Daily Herald.
This week I read with some interest a Brown Daily Herald article about the visit of dana boyd (yes, she spells her name with no caps), a Brown alum (’00) who has established a reputation as an astute observer of the social networking culture and the issues that arise from so many of us using one or another of these virtual communication tools. Her research has focused especially on teens and social networking.
Continue reading “Social Networking Researcher, dana boyd, Speaks at Brown University”
No words console a family when a child dies, especially a loss caused by cruel and bigoted peers who don’t comprehend digital world distinctions between right and terribly wrong. A much-loved boy, a gifted musician, a young man who made others smile and relax with beautiful music — and whose sexual identity was no one’s business but his own, even in the confusing milieu of a freshman college dorm — is dead.
For the rest of us — parents, teachers, religious leaders, and other adults — much can be said. Tyler Clementi’s suicide dramatically illustrates, yet again, the youth disconnect between privacy as we knew it in the past and the increasingly few layers that protect us today. With no clear definition of privacy, children, adolescents, and even young adults perceive few behavior boundaries –those lines in the sand that delineate the ethical from the unethical, the fun from the vicious. How many more children do we have to lose?
Whatever can we do?
Can your family go for a week without social networking activities? In my family we go nuts when our Earthlink DSL goes down, which happens for a few minutes at least once each evening, let along not getting to use some of the most valuable web-based tools for a week.
Harrisburg University, a small college in Pennsylvania asked students and faculty to go without YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and more for one week, not to punish the college community, but to examine why they use these resources and why people need them. The university community is asking questions such as “What part the social networking tools play life and business?” and “What would happen if social networking were not around?”
Continue reading “Experiment: Go Without Social Media for One Week”
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