The Internet can be terrifying. For parents who don’t know what goes on online, and those who do but can’t control what their kids do there, the baleful tone of the Frontline special “Growing Up Online” (WGBH, Tuesday at 9 pm) is sure to be scary.
Kids today! The first generation to grow up with the World Wide Web at their fingertips, they spend hours upon hours online. They text and IM with the freneticism of caffeinated gerbils. They hang out on MySpace and Facebook the way past generations used to loiter in the Cumby’s parking lot.
In the classroom, teachers embrace multimedia, trying to get through to their media-besotted students. “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,” says one principal. “We almost have to be entertainers.” (Wise to the fact that hordes of students rely on the crib resource sparknotes.com, they also require pupils to submit homework via turnitin.com, an online plagiarism-detection service.)
No question, the Internet’s omnipresence in teens’ lives — never mind some kids’ debilitating addiction to it — can be startling. One remarkable sequence of events spotlighted in this film takes place at a New Jersey high school, where a beef between catty cliques that had percolated on MySpace eventually erupts into a real-world cafeteria brawl. The fight is filmed via cell-phone cameras, and the clips are uploaded to YouTube.
Even scarier are the ways kids use the vast reach of cyberspace to seek solace in self-destructive ways. We meet one teen whose parents have no idea she’s anorexic. Yet she spends nights posting to eating-disorder message boards, their members united in devotion to “The Goddess Ana,” comparing notes on how to keep themselves thin.
And, of course, cyber bullying is horrific. Once upon a time, home offered refuge, however temporary, from schoolyard taunts. Now, the Internet means there’s little escape from harassment and ridicule. Sites such as MySpace are spattered with vicious messages and “hot or not” polls that can be read and re-read by the picked-upon (and scores of his or her classmates) at any hour of the day. No, says one grieving father, the Internet wasn’t the cause of his seventh-grade son’s suicide, but it “helped amplify and accelerate the hurt and the pain that he was trying to deal with.”
As Lauren Collins writes in the most recent New Yorker (in an article about the heartbreaking suicide of MySpace hoax victim Megan Meier), online social lives can be “more mercurial, and perhaps more crucial to [kids’] sense of status and acceptance” than the ones they live at school.
But that’s a two-sided coin. We’re also introduced to Jessica, a shy 14 year old who concocted the online identity of “Autumn Edows” a raven-haired goth, posing for provocative (but not pornographic) self-portraits. She fast developed a following. When school officials found her site, they freaked. So did her parents, who made her delete every photo as they watched. It was crushing. Online, Jessica had been able to gain confidence: “I just became this whole different person. I didn’t feel like myself, but I liked the fact that I didn’t feel like myself.”
Yes, it’s disturbing to think that one in seven kids is solicited online. And it’s depressing to meet the mother who keeps her kids’ Facebook passwords in a sealed envelope so she can access their account should anything ever happen to them.
But when you hear Frontline intoning gravely that the Internet’s ubiquity “punctured the sense of safety” in one small town, it’s also worth remembering that, for all the danger inherent in it, the opportunities the Web affords — for education, for communication, for self-actualization — are far more profound.
