What is the appeal? Creating and enhancing a Web page enables a young person to express his or her identity. Online social networks allow young ones to meet many new “friends.”
What you should know. “A social networking site is like an online party,” says a girl named Joanna. “Some very scary people can show up.” The personal information posted on social networks can be exploited by unscrupulous youths and adults. Thus, Internet safety expert Parry Aftab calls such sites “one stop shopping for sexual predators.”
Furthermore, Internet friendships tend to be superficial. On their Web pages, some youths accumulate a number of online contacts whom they have never met face-to-face, simply to appear popular to others who visit their site. In her book Generation MySpace, Candice Kelsey writes that it really comes down to “judging a person’s social stock value merely by how many other people like him or her.” She adds: “This commodities-trading style of relating reduces our children to nonhuman entities and places an inordinate amount of pressure to represent themselves in whatever way will gain them more friends.” Thus, What in the World Are Your Kids Doing Online? asks a valid question: “How do you make it clear that children need to develop empathy and compassion when the electronic world allows them to meet and discard people at the drop of a hat?”
(Awake 2008)Grandfather Clock
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