Reactions to "Growing Up Online"

The PBS Frontline special “Growing Up Online” is a thorough examination of the Internet generation and the effects it is having on parenting children in the digital divide. I would like to point out that this documentary only seems to focus on the negative aspects of living in the Internet age. Their are many aspects of the Internet that have improved our lives and made them more productive. However, most of the points made in this documentary are valid and need to be addressed.

The most worrisome aspect of this documentary for me was seeing it from a perspective of an adult who also has experience relating with what these troubled teenagers were going through. My generation will mark one of the first that has “come of age” on the Internet and has transitioned to parenthood. I’d like to think I’m more technically savvy than the average person but I cannot predict what technologies my kids or grand-kids will be using and whether I’ll be able to understand them. The Internet is still evolving and has yet to reach its peak. We are even likely to witness several iterations of the Web before the decade is up.

One of the main problems that seemed to be occurring throughout this documentary is when the parents are separated by a digital divide between themselves and their children. The divide is much more than, “the troubling gap between those who use computers and the Internet and those who do not.” It involves understanding that the world has experienced a paradigm shift and parents who try to get by raising their kids using the same methods that their parents had will end up encountering problems. As the parents struggle with trying to understand how to discipline an on-line enabled teenager they start to overreact and make mistakes. The parents are not entirely to blame, I feel the pace of technological development has quickened so much that it is leaving the uninformed behind.

The High School featured in the documentary had already taken many steps in the right direction as the co-principle pointed out, “We have to be interactive because they’re accustomed to sitting in front of a screen, and they’ve got five windows up and they’re talking to three people at the same time. We’ve got almost every instructional space in our building now with an LCD projector. We’ve got smartboards in the classrooms. We’ve got podcasting. Teachers are broadcasting sections of their classes so that kids can revisit those at a later time. 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. And our teachers are not doing that” (source). The problem with this approach is that not all schools are able to afford this kind of technology. I believe it is necessary to evolve with the times so I think Chatham High School is doing the right thing. We can prevent many of the problems that the kids in the documentary encountered by having schools that take a more proactive role in educating kids about proper internet behavior.

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