PBS Frontline Growing Up Online Jan 22
The following upcoming event was posted on Web4Lib:
http://lists.webjunction.org/web4lib/
FRONTLINE presents
GROWING UP ONLINE
Tuesday, January 22, 2008, at 9 P.M. ET on PBS
Jessica Hunter was a shy and awkward girl who struggled to make friends at school. Then, at age 14, she reinvented herself online as *Autumn Edows,* an alternative goth artist and model who posted provocative photos of herself on the Web, and fast developed a cult following. *I just became this whole different person,* Jessica tells FRONTLINE.
*I didn*t feel like myself, but I liked the fact that I didn*t
feel like myself. I felt like someone completely different. I felt like
I was famous.*
News of Jessica*s growing fame as Autumn Edows reached her parents only by accident. *I got a phone call, and the principal says one of the parents had seen disturbing photographs and material of Jessica,* her father tells FRONTLINE. *They were considered to be pornographic. … I had no idea what she was doing on the Internet. That was a big surprise.*
Airing Tuesday, January 22, 2008, at 9 P.M. ET on PBS (check local listings), FRONTLINE takes viewers inside the private worlds that kids are creating online, raising important questions about just how radically the Internet is transforming the experience of childhood. *It*s just this huge shift in which the Internet and the digital world was something that belonged to adults, and now it*s something that really is the province of teenagers, * says C.J. Pascoe, a Ph.D. scholar with the University of California, Berkeley*s Digital Youth Project. *They*re able to have a private space, even while they*re still at home. They*re able to communicate with their friends and have an entire social life outside of the purview of their parents without actually having to leave the house.*
[snip]
At school, teachers are trying to figure out how to reach a generation that no longer reads books or newspapers. *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,* one school principal says. *We almost have to be entertainers,* a longtime history teacher tells FRONTLINE. *If you look at the advertising world and the media world that they live in, they consume so much media. We have to cut through that cloud of information around them, cut through that media
and capture their attention.*
*You have a generation faced with a society with fundamentally
different properties thanks to the Internet,* says Danah Boyd, a
fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School. *We can turn our backs and say, *This is bad,* or, *We don*t want a world like this.* It*s not going away. So instead of saying that this is terrible, instead of saying, *Stop MySpace; stop Facebook; stop the Internet,* it*s a question for us of how we teach ourselves and our children to live in a society where these properties are fundamentally a way of life. This is public life today.*
Posted by Rich
