I don't think social media is getting any easier to navigate. There's a lot of information circling amongst my peers purporting the merits of 'going social' by creating a district Facebook page or by joining the ranks of the 'twittering Superintendents' ... or by doing both, since each has its separate merits.
Racing through my head lately is that piece of professional advice, coupled with a nagging fear that Orange isn't doing enough to make our kids as cybersmart as they should be before hitting middle school, ... and tripled by this information I just read this week: Author Emily Bazelon wrote an article in The Atlantic detailing
how an anonymous student created a Facebook page called "let's Start Drama" at a Middletown, Connecticut, middle school and used the page to bully her fellow
students. She called herself simply 'Drama Queen.' Bazelon writes, “She hovered over them in
cyberspace like a bad fairy, with the power to needle kids into ending
friendships and starting feuds and fistfights… Wrapped in her cloak of
anonymity, she was free to pass along cruel gossip without personal
consequences. She started by posting a few idle rumors, and when that gained
her followers, she asked them to send her private messages relaying more
gossip, promising not to disclose the source. Which girl had just lost her virginity?
What boy had asked a girl to sext him a nude photo?” Before long, Drama Queen
had an audience of 500, many of whom had follow-up comments on the rumors. She
pitted students against each other by posting side-by-side photos of girls and
asking who was hotter and photos of boys asking, “Who would win a fight?” It turns out that after investigating, the middle school turned up 12 other pages of the same ilk.
Any parent and educator would find this scenario scary. She had 500 like-minded participants -- or, at least voyeurs into this dehumanizing world she had created?
In my mind, we should be teaching our children to be exactly the same person on-line as they are in person... they should be the same person they are when they walk the corridors of the school... and the streets of any new city they visit. If they wouldn't go up to other classmates, in person, and call them names or say cruel things, then they shouldn't do it online either. If they wouldn't walk up to a stranger in the mall and hand that stranger a picture of themselves in their underwear, then they shouldn't 'sext' that picture, or post it online, either. There's something about the 'artificiality' of social media that has stripped us of the basic sensibilities we know to be true in our daily interactions with 'real' people. It's as if in the social media arena we aren't 'responsible' for what we say in the same way we are responsible for ourselves in public.
In the Bazelton article, she talks about two 'organizations' who are tackling the cruelty of cyberbullying; one is BullySpace and the other is Anonymous (yes! that same controversial vigilante group). Both are using artificial intelligence and algorithms to detect bullying language and posts and then targeting those message posters with pop-ups which read anything from, "That was nasty! Wait 60-seconds before you post!" to expletive-driven, 'What gives you the right!' messages. Facebook, who reports that kids would rather be expelled from school than expelled from Facebook, has started shutting down offensive pages. But, in truth, they are coming late to the party!
If you haven't already, it's not too late to talk to your pre-teen about social media and what your expectations are for his or behavior in that arena as well as in public. We can't assume that they are naturally transferring those values, and the consequences for mistakes can be devastating. Often, when cyberbullies are caught, or when a community finds out about a bullying page and lashes out at the kids who started it, the kids are shocked. They say they 'were only trying to have some fun!' They claim they 'didn't know anyone would be hurt by it!' They rationalize 'it's not like it was real or anything!'
It's not easy to navigate, and it's real!
