I admit it… I don’t know what to do about the article in today’s New York Times about teenagers misbehaving and publishing it online. I do wonder if what we are seeing is just a very public display of typical teenage behavior or if this is new. From the article:
"Teens have been doing inappropriate things for a long time, but now they think they can become celebrities by doing it," said Dr. Andrew Adesman, chief of developmental and behavioral pediatrics at Schneider Children’s Hospital at Long Island Jewish Medical Center.
"In the past, you’d brag to your friends in the locker room about doing something stupid or crazy or daring," Dr. Adesman said. "Now the Internet provides additional motivation. But these things can just as easily lead to criminal prosecution as broad celebrity."
In the classroom, in the cafeteria, in their bedrooms or on the street, teenagers are quick on the draw with the camera phone. They flip, click and post, then hope Web users will watch them.
I worry. I worry that the same spark of recognition of the wider world that we see when students blog for the first time… when students realize that people all over the world are interested in their stories… that same feeling, now expressed more darkly, is what is powering some of the insanity — and there really isn’t another word for it — that we are seeing in the worst of the Web 2.0 publishing.
And here’s the other concern, if the only concern was that teenagers were as capable as acting as poorly as they ever have been, only now those exploits would be published (and archived) for the world to see, then that’d be bad, but not apocalyptic. What I fear is, in much the same way we hope the Web 2.0 tools will spur our students to greater heights, the 15 minutes of fame that one would get from a street fight or fence-plowing (read the article, I can’t explain it) posted to YouTube is spurring kids on to more and more dangerous behavior.
So what do we do?
Pandora’s Box is open, and kids are finding these sites and more of them are contributing to them than we’d like. What do we do?
One, this reinforces, to me, the need to teach wisdom. To teach students about these tools and how to use them responsibly. We have no choice but to teach students to own the stories they tell about themselves and to consider thoughtfully and powerfully the way in which they allow their online persona to be created — much like we would talk to them about the way they portray themselves offline. We cannot pretend these things aren’t happening, and we cannot pretend that the curriculum of schools cannot teach kids about all of this. We have to be smart, caring mentors to students as we ask them to deeply consider the way they live their lives, because the stakes, it seems to me, are getting higher.
But there’s a larger question here, and it is well beyond the scope of one blog entry, but it’s something that I am starting to kick around. In the past fifty years, we have seen the rise of youth culture, the rise of the rebellous teenager, the rise of the teenage life as very separate from adult life. I wonder if that notion needs to be revisited, and I wonder what that might look like. In schools, I wonder if that is something that the rising call for a revised senior year that revolves more around adult experiences, be they internships, service learning or higher education, might help to focus. At home, I wonder if that means a more integrated life between the adults and kids that reinvigorates the family meal and the family experience — no matter how you define family.
I really don’t have answers, but it seems to me like the stakes of teenage life are getting higher and higher, and it worries me. Between the images kids get from old media about the glorification of dangerous behavior and the willingness to go further and futher in their own lives to create an online persona of themselves engaging in that dangerous behavior, students do seem more and more at risk. Schools can — and must — take up some of the burden by teaching students about the world we live in, about how to make smart, safe, ethical choices, both online and off. But I am starting to wonder about the entire notion of "the teenager" and if time has come to re-evaluate what that term means and signifies as a society.
