... a community that presents many opportunities, but also many challenges for young people. Although teenagers-and sometimes, children- do have great technical skills and media literacy, they are usually unprepared to deal with the various ethical issues that might result from submitting to a public network private information, thoughts, videos or pictures.
The Internet is a "community of unknown size", to quote Professor Howard Gardner (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izRRmW5KKLY), which means that what would be one little, unnoticeable event that only your neighbourhood or schoolmates would witness can easily be shown to more than one hundred persons in a few hours. Just think about Facebook, and how many people forget about adjusting their privacy settings, therefore making public their name, location, videos, pictures and posts which could eventually be spread on the Internet- or accessed by any "friend", whose identity might be not even be clear.
The digital world allows people to try on "new masks"; some make responsible use of these "new masks", while others use them to abuse or deceive, as Professor Gardner mentioned. This sense of moral duty and obligations, also called ethics, is what young people should develop: a sense of identity first, but also a sense of privacy, and a better understanding of the moral obligations they have towards the whole community.
Did you know ... ?
- Teens are willing to meet with strangers: 16 percent of teens considered meeting someone they've only talked to online and 8 percent have actually met someone they only knew online (Online Victimization of Youth: Five Years Later. 2006)." Retrieved November 12th, from http://enough.org/inside.php?id=3K03RC4L00#2)
- Four percent of all youth Internet users received aggressive sexual solicitations, which threatened to spill over into "real life". These solicitors asked to meet the youth in person, called them on the telephone, or sent offline mail, money, or gifts. Also 4 percent of youth Internet users had distressing sexual solicitations that left them feeling upset of extremely afraid (Online Victimization of Youth: Five Years Later, 2006). Retrieved November 12th, from http://enough.org/inside.php?id=3K03RC4L00#2)
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ReplyDeleteYour post is very interesting. I particularly agree with you when you say that ‘‘young people should develop a sense of identity first, but also a sense of privacy, and a better understanding of the moral obligations they have towards the whole community’’. I think that too many young people in our society have little knowledge of their own identity and are unaware of what is privacy and how it should morally be respected. I believe that many young people have a hard time understanding and adhering to the ethical aspects of privacy because of programs such as facebook, in which there seems to exist no privacy limits.
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