aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Tuesday, February 28, 2006

Social networking sites: teen menace or teachable moment?

I just listened to John Shehan of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children in this ITConversations podcast warn of the threat that social networking sites pose to children and teenagers who share personal information. I came away decidedly unimpressed.

I’m not at all convinced that awareness requires the scare tactics of inflammatory rhetoric and sensationalistic terms; I actually think adults - and probably chidren too - respond better to honest and accurate asssesments. I know there are real threats and real problems; I’m just not sure we’re looking at them.

In this instance, I think the truth is closer to what Wired reported yesterday:

The most oft-stated concern about all this [personal information revealed on social networking sites] is that predators might use it to track down the kids, then abduct or attack them. Actual cases of this happening are hard to find. Instead...the teens themselves are being treated as offenders, garnering punishment for writing about their teachers, school administrators or each other.

In November, a 16-year-old girl at Paramus High School in New Jersey had three days added to an existing suspension for posting mean comments about another student on her MySpace page. Last month, seven students in Lincoln, Nebraska, were suspended from their high school basketball team after a MySpace message mentioned they’d been drinking alcohol.

Early this year, administrators at Powell High School in Tennessee suspended two sophomores and a junior for as long as 30 days for posting off-color messages under a teacher’s name. Last week, under threat of an ACLU lawsuit, Littleton High School in Colorado reluctantly readmitted a 16-year-old MySpace user who had been suspended for posting a satirical commentary on the school.

In many of these cases it’s clearly the adults who are misbehaving. Under a 1969 Supreme Court decision Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District, even on-campus student speech is afforded First Amendment protection at public schools, unless it “materially disrupts classwork or involves substantial disorder or invasion of the rights of others.”

Educators should buy-in to the “teachable moment” notion and use the opportunity to guide safe internet habits:

“Maybe the MySpace medium is another channel where we can be working with our students,” says Fenger. To that end, he’s forming a student-teacher committee to explore positive uses of MySpace. “The reason I think a lot of schools don’t go this way is it takes staff, it takes resources. It takes faculty time and it takes students’ time.”

Boyd argues persuasively that MySpace is serving an important role for teens who need to interact with one another away from adults as part of the normal socialization process. “We all forget that teenage years are all about hanging out,” she says.

Teens are doing this on the internet, in part, because there are fewer public places they can claim as their own, and safety-conscious parents are more reluctant than past generations to let their kids go out into a real world unsupervised.

NOTE: The photo is a stilll of NYU’s Siva Vaidhyanathan being interviewed by Demetri Martin for a Daily Show Trendspotting segment on Social Networking. Demetri’s got 9,000 friends… now that’s an issue. Not a “problem” but worth looking at. It’s also a fun segment!