Growing Up Online Video ReflectionEDEP 631Mike Pearson

The PBS Frontline Documentary

Growing Up Online

was an interesting snapshot of nearly current adolescent online behavior, and the various reactions of adults. At the time of the documentary, Facebook and MySpace combined had over 160M users, today Facebook hasover 400M users and MySpace has over 67M users. The Chatham High School reaction wasparticularly telling for me. Some teachers worked to prevent plagiarism via “turnitin.com”and others seemed to accept plagiarism as no different from assembling research materials,with the Social Studies teacher Steve Maher appearing to dismiss the idea of plagiarismaltogether. One needs to be wary of documentaries, since the filmmakers may choose onlyinterviews that make their point, but none of the students interviewed in that section seemedinterested in reading the primary literary material. I could certainly empathize with RoseProspera, the English teacher, and her sense that students were far less capable of concentration than students from the preSocial Media ear. I suspect she was disheartenedthat the school administrators wanted to cater to all of the shallow, “entertain me now”mindset that comes from electronic social media instead of setting up a school environmentwhere richer thought and greater consideration could take place.I was very encouraged to follow the arc of Jessica/Autumn Edows. The fact that herparents were concerned about some of the more risque aspects of her online persona, butcame to see the persona as a creative act – something to nurture with a bit of judgement –spoke well of them and their ability to manage and adjust their relationship with their

daughter. Much of the online world of adolescents is an active working of their search to find,or create, an identity. I thought the documentary did a good job of highlighting this.The documentary also highlighted that the internet allows people the chance to findniches that they might not be able to find if they were confined to just what could be found inthe real world. Sara's encouragement to indulge her eating disorder, the goddess Annaperversities, the websites that helped girls find tricks to purge without damaging the throatso much – all of those things would be very difficult to find a sufficient number of peopleinvolved in (and anonymously) if she were only able to look for them in her suburb. I wasglad that she ended up telling her parents of her eating disorder and getting into therapy.Most of the other sections of the documentaries were the standard “parents of teenagers are concerned about the newfangled stuff they are into.” Parents of teenagers usedto worry about the effects of comic books, or rocknroll, or horseless carriages: now the hipthing to worry about is social media.To me, the intriguing and exciting possibilities for social media involve the creation orexploration of different identities. Adolescents can try on different personas with much moresafety online, compared to the real world. Though, they can also try on much more extremepersonas than they might try in the real world and have access to odder niches than theymight otherwise have. At some point, if the persona is something the adolescent findsattractive enough, it can be introduced to the real world. A couple of years ago I took severalof my students from Kauai to a robotics competition at the Convention Center in Honolulu.There was a CosPlay convention going on at the same time, with hundreds of young peoplemade up in elaborate costumes like their favorite anime characters. Social media allows