In Part III, I discussed the over-blown concerns in the media about those under 18 participating in blogging and social networking software, particularly MySpace, which seems to be the boogeyman in most articles.
But there are kids engaging in ill-advised behavior, as perpetrators and victims. The degree of poor decision-making ranges from the inappropriate to the illegal. (Surprise! People, including teens, making poor choices!)
The only way anybody learns to make good decisions is to make a series of poor decisions and live with the consequences. The thing we need to do as parents, is to make sure that the cost of our children's poor decision-making is just high enough to learn, to sting ,
I firmly believe that both blogging (such as what you are reading) and membership in internet-enabled social networks (such as MySpace) have real benefits, for adults and teens--even preteens, with limits. We should be enabling our children to make good choices, even online, and live with the consequences.
Clarifying the Issues
As I wrote this article, it became
clear to me that the issue of students' presence on the internet, and
schools' response to student internet use, have a number of issues, not
always clearly thought out by commenters. Here are the discrete issues
I see:
- School-based computing: inappropriate use of scarce resources (the primary reason many of the districts gave for blocking school-based access to Xanga, LiveJournal, and MySpace) (This I covered in Part II)
- Students' on-line safety--the "Internet Predator/Stranger Danger" fear, that a bad person could find and harm the student from content the student posted to sites such as Xanga, LiveJournal, and MySpace. (This I covered in Part III)
- Students' on-line safety-- students' being exposed to pornography and other inappropriate content. (This I covered in Part III)
So what are we left with:
- The content of students' blogs (Xanga, LiveJournal) and social networking accounts (MySpace): Students' inapppropriate interactions online with fellow students (the cyberbullying fear, or actual instances of students abusing or harrassing each each other).
- The content of students' blogs (Xanga, LiveJournal) and social networking accounts (MySpace): using such spaces to voice harsh, even foul-mouthed criticisms of school administration
- Repercussions to students from on-line content they have posted: School administration finding out that students have engaged in illegal or banned activites (drinking, cheating, harassment) and using that content to discipline students
- Repercussions to students from on-line content they have posted: What's posted on the internet may live forever, coming back to injure a person in the future (Example: one's teen excesses showing up when a future employer undertakes a web search on a prospective employee).
Let's take these in a step-wise fashion.
As we go through these accounts, keep a sense of perspective.
One: Almost all of the examples of negative behavior are independent of the internet. That is to say, if you take away MySpace, kids are still going to be rude, ostracize some of their peers, and say hurtful things. Eliminating one amplifier does not eliminate the roots of the behavior.
Two: There are thousands of high schools and middle schools in the United States. You are going to hear about a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of those schools where online activities have caused problems.
Three: We only hear about the ways in which blogging and/or social networking software is negative or causes problems. Good aspects are rarely reported. I can imagine quite a few: a blog that helps a kid to higher academic achievement, a blog that point out some real problems in a school that can be addressed, a group of friends using MySpace to organize a service learning project, a MySpace group that helps friends who have become geographically separated stay in touch. You aren't going to read about those kind of examples in the press.
On-line Storms of Uncivil Teens: Being Rude or Cruel About One's Peers
The first one I've been able to find reported (although surely not the first instance) was reputed to have started in January 2005, and was reported by Newsday on September 18, 2005 (archived at Myschool online),
posted in January by a 17-year-old Smithtown High School student from Nesconset on a Web site called MySpace.com...-the question dangles out there like a virtual piñata. "I want everyone to take a moment and really think about who you hate in our school," he writes, "then choose the one that you have the most disdain for and write it here for all to see. this may cause violance ... agression, and death. but iam willing to look past that for the better of the cause. so lets here it."
Take a moment and think about this. The boy in question thought it was a good idea to foment conflict among his peers. He things he is increasing something --perhaps "keeping it real." At any rate, the discussion went on for months. If I were that young man's mother, I think we'd have some talking to do. How about you? Would it sit well with you if your child were encouraging hurtful conversation in this manner? How would you handle it?
In response to the Smithtown episode, and the upswing of worry about "cyberbullying", Kimberly Swigert posed four philosophical questions that I think are worth considering:
1. Should it be considered bullying if the recipient is not the direct target of the remark, and may in fact never learn about the remark?
2. Should it be considered bullying if it's just speech, and not action?
3. Should it be considered bullying if it's just a joke?And most importantly:
4. Should it be considered bullying if there's no way to regulate this? It's impossible to catch all these sites, and virtually impossible to decisively identify who is participating. If it's defined as bullying, then it's a problem without a solution.
On October 27, 2005, two girls were suspended from Oregon City High School for several days after posting ridiculing and disparaging comments about their classmates. Their behavior, although shameful, was not deemed to be criminal.
Also in October,
A 16-year-old junior [girl] at Paramus High School in Paramus, N.J., was suspended last month after teasing a classmate during school and implying he was gay. While at home on her suspension, she posted some comments on MySpace -- including a post in which she commiserated with a friend who was paired with the boy for an activity in gym class. "Poor u … not fun not fun,"
The Paramus student claimed that she was friends with the classmate, and "just joking". It seems to me that if her comment had been made in a face-to-face or phone conversation with the second classmate, no one would have known about it. Here the issue is that her secondary conversation, while she was suspended, came to the attention of school officials.
In October, 2005, the Manteca School District sent home a warning to parents about Myspace, first about the dangers of internet predators, but stressing the issue of cyberbullying (view PDF here)
MySpace.com has also become a frequent source of cyberbullying. Cyberbullying occurs when a preteen or teen is tormented, threatened, harassed, humiliated, ridiculed or otherwise targeted by another preteen or teen using the Internet.
Our recommendation is that you immediately monitor and check the website on a regular and ongoing basis for any activity in which your minor children may be involved. As a parent, we encourage you to be proactive in discussing with your child(ren) appropriate and inappropriate uses of the Internet, email, and such websites.
Please be sure that your child(ren) understand that if they torment, threaten, harass, humiliate, ridicule, or otherwise target or cyberbully another individual who they know through school, that the school can discipline (including suspend or expel) for inappropriate use of the Internet, email, or computers if such inappropriate use is related to school.
We interpret the relationship to school to include messages sent from a home computer or other computer activity on the home computer if the messages are sent to or talk about another student, the school, or school staff or if the computer activity is otherwise related to school activity or attendance.
Please also be sure that your child understands that if your child is the target or victim of such school- related behavior, that the cyberbullying should be immediately reported to school administration for investigation and corrective action if verified
On November 18, 2005, three students were suspended from Rampart High School in Colorado:
Three high school students accused of leaving nasty messages about two others students on a Web page created off campus have been suspended.
The Rampart High School students were suspended Friday on the grounds that the contents of the Web page, created on Myspace.com, were harassing and threatening, said Nanette Anderson, spokeswoman for Academy School District 20.
Myspace.com is a commercial site that allows people to create profiles, blogs and group sites. Friends can use the site to share photos and interact online.
Four girls, including one who didn't attend Rampart, created a page with messages bad-mouthing a couple after a falling out. It was titled with a sentence including two students' names and an obscene epithet asking for them to die.
One of the suspended girls later apologized, in a heartfelt manner:
"It was created on the spur of the moment in a flash of anger, by kids not thinking about how hurtful and what the consequences might be and it should've been deleted a long time ago!" she said. "I'm more sorry than any of you could know . . . I'm disappointed in myself, my family is disappointed in me, and I'm sure once everyone else finds out they will be too. I let a lot of people down by doing this and I am deeply sorry . . . I did not realize how powerful such a group could be!"
Teens Engaging In Illegal Activities, Represented or Made Online
In October 2005, several members of
Salem High School's varsity cheerleading squad was under scrutiny for underage drinking, after the discovery of party photos posted on MySpace.
According to the school's policy, any student who joins a sports team at Salem High is required to sign a form promising not to take drugs or drink alcohol. A student can be suspended from after-school activities for a quarter of the season if caught drinking or doing drugs, even if it's not on school grounds.
Evidently there have been sanctions against students engaging in reprehensible or illegal behavior at Gulf Breeze High School in Florida, as represented on MySpace profiles and sites. The exact details are hard to come by. The administration seems to be examining students' MySpace posting, and imposing consequences. Students contest the administration's views on the matter.
On December 8, 2005, a teen in Eastlake, Ohio was arrested for making threats on his Myspace account:
The posted message said he was going to come to school with a gun and kill everyone, police said.
"He sent the post to another individual from the school who read it and notified her mother about it. Her mother contacted the school," said Sgt. Robert Gonzalez.
The boy accused of making the threat has been suspended from school and police have charged him with inducing panic, a fourth-degree felony. Police have released him to the custody of his parents.
The boy told police that it was just a joke, and he hadn't intended to actually carry out the threat. However, the school and authorities take all such threats seriously.
On November 27, 2005, The Oregonian published a packet for their subscribers on the uses and abuses of teens online, focusing on MySpace.
The principal of Gladstone High, Stu Evans, warned students about irresponsible behavior online:
Evans also noted that a picture posted on MySpace of a student drinking or breaking other rules might be all the evidence the school needs to suspend a student from playing sports or participating in other school activities.
"We can't be playing Internet cop on every blog station," he said. "But we are saying to our kids, 'be careful.' "
Brandon Wolf, 17, is an African American and was elected to student body president at Canby High School. He was the target of some racist remarks online, which escalated after Wolf asked his classmates to refrain from posting rude and offensive comments. But upon reflection, Wolf thinks
it's unfair to blame MySpace for the conflict at Canby. Online forums are the same as real conversations among teenagers, he said. Students need to take responsibility for what they do and say on the Internet, he said.
"It's the kids' problem for saying these things," he said. "People are going to say hateful things, but you just have to move on.
Teens Critical of Their Schools' Performance (and Administrators and Faculty)
In April 2003, Ryan Dwyer created a website critical of his middle school. The language was temperate, not rude or vulgar. Administrators found out about the site, and demanded he remove it. His parents later filed suit against the school district, who settled in Dwyer's favor.
In March 2005, a high school student, Eliazar Velasquez, took photographs of his principal,Elaine Almagno, breaking both school rules and state law, by smoking outside the building. The student then posted the photos to a site he maintained (http://centralscoop.tripod.com/). The student was suspended. (Have not been able to track down the ultimate outcome of l'affaire Almagno)
On December 6, 2005, three 6th and 7th graders in an academic acceleration program at Taft High School were suspended for making offensive and threatening remarks about specific, named teachers. ("She'll see oh yes, there will be blood,'' and, "no, I won't kill her ... yet'' and her "neck will be ... slit like a ...... chicken!") In this case, the children being disciplined were suspended not for the criticism, but for the verbal violence.
Repercussions of Bad Behavior and Trash-Talking Not Restricted to Students: Adults Do It and Suffer the Consequences Too.
The Automobile Club of Southern California fired a total of 27 workers in August 2005, for comments made on MySpace. The cause of the firing was primarily another worker's reporting harrassment stemming from remarks about appearance and sexual orientatin, and secondarily from the workers' plans for a work slowdown.
What Are The Patterns? Is MySpace A Terrible Thing? Do Social Networking Platforms Increase Bullying (Cyberbullying?)
From the cases reported above, it seems there are some patterns.
First, what we might call trash-talk: something about the anonymity of the internet seems to losen peoples tongues fingers. "Flame wars" are well-known since the earliest days of the internet. (Wikipedia on flame wars) In 2001, David Weinberger wrote a column "The Causes and Cure for Online Hostility: Why Are We Such Jerks Online?"
Why are we such jerks online? No, not all of us. Well, okay all of us at some time or another. And some of us most of the time. We get a headful of steam about something, and off we go, spreading the gospel of Truth and Goodness while sneering at the pitiful mortals who have the audacity to say something with which we disagree. Or we overstate a position that, taken down a few notches might actually be quite reasonable. Or we make lame jokes at the expense of others. Or we assume a shared point of view, a type of false camaraderie undergirded by arrogance.
Weinberg cites anonymity and the lack of real-time, face-to-face interaction. Both of these features also exist on sites such as MySpace. Weinberg is talking about well-educated adults....is it any wonder that kids in the process of being educated also succumb to the effects of anonymity and facelessness?
Now on to what we might call "a storm of speaking ill of other students". This sort of thing happens with or without students' being on-line, as anyone familiar with teens and schools can tell you. As Mike the Actuary said, "It would seem to me that LJ and MySpace are a natural evolution of some of the banter and (occasionally risque or tasteless) play that teens have engaged in since time immemorial." The "storm" seems to be a type of mob psychology:
Mike Hardcastle, at About.com, has several excellent pages on what he calls "social weapons": gossip, name calling, and ostracism and alienation: how each functions and suggestions for teens to react.
Why do these trash-talking storms happen? Alexander Hamilton said: "The more numerous an assembly may be, of whatever characters composed, the greater is known to be the ascendancy of passion over reason." Konrad Lorenz claimed that that there exists a group communal response (which may evolved in our pre-human ancestors) whereby a human crowd can become decidedly aggressive and lose all rationality and moral inhibitions.
And social networking software such as MySpace does enable mob consciousness, because the kids can egg each other on, without being physically present. An incendiary comment posted online Tuesday morning is still there, inciting high feelings, on Friday night.
Repercussions to students from on-line content they have posted:
What's posted on the internet may live forever, coming back to injure a
person in the future
When even Dear Abby is getting in on the act, something has shifted. On December 4, 2005, Dear Abby ran the following letter:
DEAR ABBY: Please warn your readers that their Web pages and blogs could stand in the way of securing a job! Just as employers have learned to read e-mail and blogs, they have learned to screen candidates through their sites. Many people in their 20s and 30s wrongly believe their creations are entertaining and informative. Employers are not seeking political activists, evangelizers, whiners or tattletales. They do not want to find themselves facing a lawsuit or on the front page of a newspaper because a client, patient or parent of a student discovered a comment written by an employee.
The job market is tight, and job seekers must remember their computer skills can either help them land a position or destroy a job prospect. -- CHICAGO EMPLOYER
People have been fired for blogging about their employer (there's even a slang term, "dooced" -- Heather B. Armstrong, who wrote as Dooce, was fired for comments on her blog in 2003. It happens even now, according to Lisa Williams,
Wow. One of my best friends in the world just got Dooced.... She didn’t write about her job, and she did writing about things she was interested in on her own time. And she got fired for it..
And TechDirt noted:
Before the Internet era it was easy to leave the past behind. Bad hair and personal bouts of indiscretion were buried in yearbooks, newspapers and faded memories effectively hidden from all but the most tenacious investigators. Today, details of our sordid pasts are easily accessible by the all seeing Google (and therefore, becoming quite a useful tool for reference checks). Though Googling someone may uncover helpful tidbits (like, say, a criminal record), some people are now faced with embarassing or incorrect information when they Google themselves. So, the big question is: how do you erase your past from the de facto permanent record that is Google? True, you could try and contact Google and ask them to remove the offending result, but considering it took Google two days to regain its own hijacked listing, you shouldn't hold your breath if you ask them to ditch that goofy high school photo. If you were a company, you could hire a sneaky search engine "optimizer" to bury your past with Google bombs and link farms, but that may prove inpractical (and increasingly ineffective as Google improves its algorithms to account for these tactics). Ironically, the most effective method to root out your past seems to be to establish a solid current online presence, so that your present self is a more "relevant" result for your name than your past achievements. That, however, is quite a chore for most people. Our pasts have usually been protected by the "security by obscurity" adage -- not necessarily under lock and key, but tucked away. Now that Google is doing its best to root out obscurity, that security is becoming increasingly exposed.
So what is the bottom line? So should schools prevent students from using MySpace? I don't think so--there are benefits to both blogging and social networking software.
But I do think there is a lot of room for both parents and schools to teach students how to behave, to each other and online.
First, It is the parents' job to train their children how to behave, at home, in the classroom, and online.
Second, there are things schools can do to teach students how to behave appropriately online. Second, there are things schools can do to decrease the prevalence of bad behavior online (just as there are things schools can do to increase the odds of good behavior).
Finally, there are ways that schools and parents can work together.
I will discuss these issues more in the last section.
Part I--Blogging, social networking sites, schools, and risk for teen users
Part II -- Schools Banning Access and Banning Students' Online Presence
Part III--An Overblown Fear: The Internet Predator
Part IV--The Real Risk: Other Students' Cruel, Rude, or Illegal Behavior (or the Poster's Own Cruel, Rude, or Illegal Behavior)
Part V--The Benefits of Blogging, Personal and Educational
Part V--What Should Parents and Schools Do?
Technorati Tags: been suspended blogging myspace
I hate it when kids excuse nasty behavior by saying it was "just a joke". My response is always, "Did HE think it was funny?"
Once a kid complained to me that his classmates were laughing at him. A classmate saw this and called out, "No, no, Jake, we're not laughing AT you, we're laughing WITH you!" The only problem? Jake wasn't laughing.
Kids often have a highly inaccurate perception of what other kids are thinking and feeling. They look more at how an appreciative audience is reacting to their comments, and less at how the target of their comments is reacting. I find that my kids can't reliably read facial expressions or tone of voice, so they truly can't gauge how their "jokes" are being taken.
So I can see how "jokes" would proliferate on the Internet, in the absence of even these common cues.
Kids need a LOT of training with this.
Posted by: Lisa | Wednesday, December 14, 2005 at 02:51 AM
There's more on this issue at Scatterbox in a post titled, "Internet generation realizing a downside to growing up online."
Posted by: Scatterbox at stevensilvers.com | Thursday, January 19, 2006 at 12:51 PM