When taking classes about creative writing the one constant that appeared was regardless of how inventive a writer might be, the vast majority of the wacky stuff written is usually true: hence the cliché "you can't make this stuff up." Well on cincinnati.com, home of the [Cincinnati] Enquirer, an article title blared "Teens bare all on phone."
How titillating. So titillating that the Drudgereport picked up the story on the same day. I don't comb the Drudgereport because of any political leanings, it's just that I've found that it has a unique skill for picking up quirky stories, interspersing it among all of its other sensationalist stories. So of course Drudge picked this up. For all of those headline readers, who do not go on to read the details of the story, who gauge the news of the day via headlines, this headline is a doozy. It is further evidence that technology is responsible for driving our youth down the path towards Sodom and Gomorrah. It's perfect fodder for my Apprehensive Technophiles...
The headline accurately captured the scandal of what transpired within a small rural suburb almost 30 miles outside of Cincinnati when a 19 year old cheerleading coach took a picture of herself and a 15 year-old; they both were topless.
The article, when read in detail, did a very responsible job of journalism. While at the outset there were the shocking statistics regarding "20 percent of teens say[ing] they have sent or posted nude or semi-nude pictures or video of themselves," towards the closing of the article the Cindy Kranz, the journalist, paraphrases the quotation of an interviewee, "parents need to pay attention to their kids' use of technology." I'll come back to this.
Frightening in Kranz's research are the quotations from educators, and further statistics from studies:
"Turpin High School Principal Peggy Johnson thinks that the results would be similar - about 50-50 - in her building."
"The study also showed that 44 percent of teens say it's common for sexually explicit images and text messages - sexting - to be shared with people other than the intended recipient."
"And when a guy gets a picture like that, he's not just going to keep it between him and the girl. He's going to take that and show every guy that he knows that knows that girl. And every time somebody looks at her, it's going to be a loss of respect for her."
For me, however, this has absolutely nothing to do with technology. This line from the article sums it up, "When kids are 14 or 15, Brown said, they don't often make the right decisions."
There are studies that detail how the frontal lobe of the cerebral cortex in adolescents is under-developed in relation to the rest of the brain, skewing the outward perception we have of teens rapidly maturing. I remember one study saying something to the effect that when you ask a teenager why they did something, and their response is a blank stare, with potentially an "uh, I don't know," they are being truthful; they really don't know. Their frontal lobe is still developing, and learning how to control impulses.
With this information one might argue that putting technology like cell phones in their hands is like putting a drink in the hand of an alcoholic, or giving them a loaded gun. If you really want to demonize technology, and place the sole blame of social ills on an inanimate object, then please be my guest, but such a move denudes parents and adults of their power over guiding these children down a path of responsible learning.
If we remove these technologies from kids -- non lethal technologies -- in their teens, at what point do they learn how to learn them responsibly? Who teaches them responsible behavior? Schools? Their peers? Who do you want to have that job?
Yes, teaching youngsters about responsibility and consequences is far harder than simply removing the temptation, closing our eyes, crossing our fingers and hoping that they won't come across it somewhere else in their lives, but doesn't that sound even more risky?
These are teenagers; they're not adults. On the surface they don't want to have us show them anything, or teach them anything, but every shred of research shows that they gleam their behaviors from parents and influential adults in their lives like teachers, but the most influential are the parents.
The phones are not the problem. Apprehensive Technophiles have to work hard at getting up to speed with what these technologies can do, and more importantly educating their children regarding consequences of actions. These things didn't happen 25 years ago because the process of developing film cost money, and the likelihood of having someone come across them in either the developing process or once developed much greater. It's easy and cheap to take pictures on a phone, and easy to hide them from prying parent eyes.
You don't have to demand to see every picture on a teenager's cell phone, but you are absolutely responsible for educating children regarding the consequences of showing private things to the world; that's a hard lesson to teach too.
Digital Natives are defined by their shifting sense of privacy, where they eschew prior convention: few Apprehensive Technophiles wish to post their personal information on Internet profiles that anyone can read. Digital Natives laugh at such a notion, but what they don't see is that they restrict access to their profiles in their own ways regarding who they choose to allow as friends on their online social networking sites and through other methods. What these (typically) teens fail to recognize is the portability, and replicability of that information, and how quickly that information can proliferate on the web.
It's a hard life lesson to teach teens that sometimes you can't trust your friends. That was a hard enough lesson to learn 25 years ago, but today the repercussions are greater. Where 25 years ago a leaked secret might get through a high-school community at worst, today a photograph intended for a boyfriend, or as goofing around with "close" girlfriends can become an embarrassing public commodity seen by thousands, if not millions of people. The potential fallout from making private items public is far greater today than before, that is really the greatest casualty in the spread of communication technologies, but the baseline lesson for teens still exists regarding defining a line between what you make public, and what you keep private.
Ultimately, how children learn this is the same as for the past millennia: communication between parents and children. So if we have anyone to blame for children's technological behavior getting out of hand it is ourselves: parents and responsible adults.
RJ Lavallee is the author of IMHO (In My Humble Opinion): a guide to the benefits and dangers of today’s communication tools on sale at Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble, and lulu.com.
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