Whoop Whoop, That's The Sound of The (Internet) Police


When someone uses the phrase "safety drill" many people think of years in middle and high school getting their eardrums shattered by the fire alarm, then standing in 90-degree Florida heat for 45 minutes while teachers counted. Or, for fellow Florida public school graduates they may think of tornado safety drills where we sat hunched over and staring at a wall in the hallway. As kids, even seniors in high school, we never seemed to take these drills seriously – except the tornado drill when there was severe weather looming. I personally have a very real phobia when it comes to tornadoes, I think I watched Twister one too many times in my formative years. But, for Internet users of more recent years, they may think of safety drills referred to as “lockdown drills”. These drills were to keep students (and teachers) safe from any hostile intruder on campus. I was very lucky and only experienced this in a real-life scenario once, as a junior in high school, and the people in the school all came out unscathed when the intruder was carried away. Not all people are that lucky though and that is why safety drills in school are so important – they can literally save your life. But here is where today’s topic kicks off: if we have safety drills for a physical threat then why are there not safety drills for unseen threats as well? Why are we not preparing kids in our schools for safety threats within their computer screen? Internet safety threats are just as, if not more, present in the every day of the modern teenager. So, with so much of our youth in potential danger, why are there not any Internet safety drills or required courses? These kinds of courses could keep our youth safe from online predators and how to spot a fake account before giving them their cellphone number. We should be teaching our youth how to escape a cyberstalking situation, and not just how to recognize it but prevent it as well. To take it a step further; why are there not any courses showing the dangers students could put each other in online? Why have schools not started to require education on the danger of online bullying? I was a teenager when MySpace first came to be and I can tell you firsthand that cyberbullying started long before today. The difference is that today these reports are being taken more seriously and the damaging effects of cyberbullying are becoming more apparent in the most heartbreaking way. If you go to Google right this second and search “cyberbullying suicide” you will get approximately 9.8 million articles chronicling the young lives that have been lost due to cyberbullying. Our youth need to be prepared for the predator or “catfish” lurking behind their computer screen, but they also need to be taught that their words have consequences. We have all seen a person we may or may not know on social media say hateful things to someone behind the protection of the internet. But you and I both know that if that person was given the chance to say that exact same hurtful comment to the person they are bullying online to them in person the likelihood of them saying it is very low. Someone can throw all the profanity and derogatory words they like at someone online and never deal with any “real life” repercussions. That bully can sleep soundly at night knowing that the person they just told to kill themselves cannot come find them – or if they could then that bully can just leave or lock them out. The internet gives courage to those who are too weak to say what they feel in person and those who want to take their anger out on a stranger without “getting hurt”. When I was in high school something like this happened to me, someone attacked me through MySpace telling me to kill myself and that I was a whole slew of terrible words. The person attacking me was someone I knew, someone who went to my school that I saw every day but had never spoken to before then. I will save you, and myself, from the details but I have never been someone who will lie down and let someone treat me badly. You may have asked yourself earlier in reading this “well how does she know someone would not have the courage to say their hurtful comments in person?”. I know because I am the kind of person who will confront you in person and try to hash things out face-to-face, not behind the safety blanket of a computer screen. I am the kind of person who will jump to the defense of someone who needs it because I was raised to stand up for myself. I learned from my own cyberbullying experiences that people should not get away with something just because it took place online. This is what we need to teach our youth. The internet is more accessible than ever for younger and younger aged kids. I got my first cellphone at 15 years old and did not own a smartphone until college, but that is not the case for many teenagers these days. A lot of kids are getting smartphones at 10 years old where they can access the World Wide Web unsupervised and invite forward the monsters lurking in the corners of the internet. While many parents put parental controls on their kid’s devices not all parents do so, and some of those kids with those controls in place know exactly how to get around them. Alison Gopnick says in her TEDTalk that babies and children are more conscious than adults. Gopnick states that the youth are good at taking in a lot of information at once, which is why they often appear to not be paying attention. The real fault is that children are paying attention to too many things at once as opposed to adults and their instinct to focus on one single thought process at a time. Gopnick says that “until you do the learning you’re helpless” when talking about children and babies thought processes. I believe this same quote can be related to the youth of our country when it comes to the internet. Kids and teens are helpless online until they learn how to use the internet wisely and safely. On the market right now there are laptops, smartphones, tablets, smart watches, and plenty of other digital technology for children to use to access the internet. While the internet can be of amazing use and the ease digital technology has created to access it has been ground breaking that does not mean we should not be teaching children about it. It is called the World Wide Web for a reason, and with so many means of access to the technology harboring it for people of all ages maybe we need more education. We want our children to stay safe but physical safety is now only half of the battle.

Resources:
https://www.ted.com/talks/alison_gopnik_what_do_babies_think

Comments