Good news for worried parents: All those hours their teenagers spend socializing on the Internet are not a bad thing, according to a new study by the MacArthur Foundation.
“It may look as though kids are wasting a lot of time hanging out with new media, whether it’s on MySpace or sending instant messages,” said Mizuko Ito, lead researcher on the study, “Living and Learning With New Media.” “But their participation is giving them the technological skills and literacy they need to succeed in the contemporary world. They’re learning how to get along with others, how to manage a public identity, how to create a home page.”
The study, conducted from 2005 to last summer, describes new-media usage but does not measure its effects.
“It certainly rings true that new media are inextricably woven into young people’s lives,” said Vicki Rideout, vice president of the Kaiser Family Foundation and director of its program for the study of media and health. “Ethnographic studies like this are good at describing how young people fit social media into their lives. What they can’t do is document effects. This highlights the need for larger, nationally representative studies.”
How to manage a public identity? Now see the NYTimes report on the suicide of the young girl who, on Facebook, met a woman posing as a boy – and her motives for so posing. Tell me again what a social value MySpace is. LM
“But their participation is giving them ….. literacy they need…”
Absolutely the opposite, it is institutionalizing illiteracy.
Don
You’re both right guys. I have to agree. All I see internet time doing is breeding antisocial, immoral monsters. These kids can’t carry on a conversation with a REAL person. They can’t tell a questionable character from a good one because they have no time to be with REAL people to learn to discern such things. As for their writing??? It’s disgusting!! These kids can’t spell worth a dime. They can’t punctuate a simple four word sentence. They don’t even know the names of most of the punctuation marks. They don’t know what a “verb” is or what an “adjective” is. They don’t know where to put capital letters, etc. That’s just the grammar part. Have them read something for you and then try to tell you what it said. They will TOTALLY miss the objective of the passage or question. I give multiple choice questions on tests. The kids can’t read the question and be able to discern what the question is asking, so they get most of them wrong even though they might know the right answer. That is all due to a LACK of literacy. They don’t know what the words mean to begin with, and on top of that, their brains are so fried from electronics that they can’t even absorb the words they DO understand. They are too WIRED!!!
The guy who did this study is seriously flawed in his thinking in my opinion.
I read this morning of a case where a Florida youth committed suicide online. Apparently, this was witnessed by many but only after the boy had stopped moving for a long time, did anyone try to intervene.
I am attending a small group where we are going through Focus on the Family’s video series [url=http://www.thetruthproject.org/ ]The Truth Project[/url]. Last night was a discussion of evil from a Christian and a secular viewpoint. Numerous quotes from various secular sources like, “there is no God, there is no supernatural, there is no foundations for ethics, there is no purpose in life other than “self actualization” whatever that is.” Then they had Thomas Darymple talking about this world view’s effects on youth. He quoted Francis Bacon:
[blockquote] It is a poor centre of a man’s actions, [i]himself[/i]. [/blockquote]