Growing up online - Frontline - tues jan 22

[Doreen Peri]

FRONTLINE
http://www.pbs.org/frontline/

This Week: "Growing Up Online" (60 minutes),
Tuesday, Jan. 22 at 9pm on PBS (check local listings)
Live Discussion: Chat with producers Rachel Dretzin and John Maggio Jan. 23, 11am ET


This Tuesday's FRONTLINE comes with a warning for everyone who's never made a "friend" on MySpace, chatted with someone online, or sent a text message from a cell phone: You live in a very different world than the one in which a new generation is growing up, and this widening digital divide is becoming much more profound than anyone might have once imagined.

In "Growing Up Online," producers Rachel Dretzin and John Maggio take us inside the private worlds that kids are making on the Web, often outside the view, and comprehension, of the adults in their lives.

A teenage girl creates a new name and persona for herself and becomes an Internet celebrity from the privacy of her own bedroom. A lunch room fight gets broadcast nationally on YouTube. A ninth grader is relentlessly teased online and, tragically, is pushed to suicide by a friend's instant messages, setting his father on a journey through his son's hard drive to figure out what went wrong.

These are some of the film's more extreme and dramatic stories, but perhaps more provocative are some of the smaller moments: A high schooler matter-of-factly reports that he never reads books ("If there were 27 hours in a day, I'd read Hamlet," he says), and he's pretty sure that most of his fellow students don't read either. A young woman privately confesses that she's slipped into an online world of anorexics that she doesn't know how to escape. A boy logs onto a new Web site that aspires to be MySpace for the kindergarten crowd.

Throughout the film, parents hover nervously around their children's computers, teachers try hard not to wag their fingers at students who'd rather watch a podcast than write an essay, and academics try to understand what may be the greatest cultural shift in American history. But if you think the answers predictable, be prepared for the surprise of a teacher who thinks cheating might not be such a bad thing and a father who comes around to supporting the risque photographs that his teenage daughter had been secretly posting on the Web.

We hope you'll tune in to see how it all plays out on Tuesday night, and then join us online to watch it again, explore interviews with teachers and experts on teens and new media, and join our discussion at: http://pbs.org/frontline/kidsonline/ .

Senior Editor
Ken Dornstein



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+ Live Online Discussion on Washingtonpost.com ...

Producers Rachel Dretzin and John Maggio will be online this Wednesday, Jan. 23, at 11am ET, to discuss "Growing Up Online."

For details, see:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/co ... 02141.html

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[e_dog]

Forget the real world. paper books.

what? you mean studioeight isn't already myspace for kindergarten?

online forever. cyberspaceandcybersexadcybermarriageandcyberbirthendcyberdeath.

[bohonato]

The media in the United States has a brilliant talent of blowing most things way out of proportion. People are the same, even if the growth of technology causes hysteria that claims otherwise. The kid who hasn't read Hamlet today wouldn't have done it a hundred years ago (they would have been too busy with the radio, or perhaps dancing the foxtrot, or listening to jazz, or going to the movies, or watching television, or reading comic books, or listening to records, or going to arcades, or playing video games, or). An anorexic would still be an anorexic, a depressed teenager would still be a depressed teenager, and a girl making money with her body would do just that.

The problem in all of these stories (if, in fact, a problem does exist in all of them) is not technology. It's people inability to fix the blame where it belongs.