pfc newsletter O A K
P A R K
H I G H
December 2013
The Principal’s Message Once again we are reminded of the need to remain vigilant of the dangers of social media and our responsibilities as parents to monitor our children’s use of these powerful technologies. A couple of years ago I wrote about the dangers of MySpace, Facebook, and FormSpring and how social media had changed the face of teen interaction. It seems like things have taken on a much more mobile aspect and now Instagram, Twitter, and SnapChat are the names of the tools students are using to post, pic, chat, and cheat. The nature of teens’ internet use has transformed dramatically — from stationary connections tied to shared desktops in the home to always-on connections that move with them throughout the day. Mary Madden, Senior Researcher for the Pew Research Center’s Internet Project describes “In many ways, teens represent the leading edge of mobile connectivity, and the patterns of their technology use often signal future changes in the adult population.” It’s important to remember that the creators of these sites are some of the world’s youngest billionaires. Evan Spiegel, the 23 year –old SnapChat inventor, just turned down $4 billion from Google. Twentysomething co-creators Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger sold Instagram to Facebook in just less than two years for $1 billion. Mark Zuckerberg became a billionaire at 23 with Facebook, and Twitter also made its inventors billionaires and helped topple a 30-year Egyptian regime. Why do we care that these brilliant young entrepreneurs made it so big so fast? Because it highlights just how powerfully seductive and popular these technologies are among young people. It also serves to remind us that these are businesses and are dependent on youth for their success. The sophisticated advertisers that populate and traffic their wares on these sites are not much different than the toy and cereal manufacturers that fill the spaces between the Saturday morning cartoons, and parents face significant challenges monitoring the appropriateness of how their
S C H O O L www.oakparkusd.org/ophs teenagers use technology to communicate with each other. While these social media sites can be powerful and positive communication tools, we must take precautions to protect youth from the harm posed by the improper use of these incredible but potentially dangerous applications. Bullying in schools has existed since schools began, but today’s technology allows bullying to extend its reach not only into teenagers’ homes and bedrooms, but wherever they carry their phone. Kids are using phones, tablets, and computers, often anonymously, to threaten, intimidate, and otherwise hassle their peers. Spreading mean and embarrassing comments, pictures, and rumors online is by far the most common tactic teens use to hurt others. But the word “bullying” has lost some of its power as schools have devoted so much attention to the issue in recent years. If we were to ask a class of students, “How many of you have been bullied?” few will raise their hand," but when we break it down by behaviors: “Raise your hand if someone has spread rumors about you, Raise your hand if you've watched someone being ostracized in the last week. Raise your hand if someone has called you a derogatory name this week.” Many hands will shoot up. When we ask whether this has happened online, even more hands are raised. Kids today often vent electronically when they’re hurt, upset or angry. Faced with trying to resolve the problem in an uncomfortable and difficult face-to-face conversation, versus the ease of venting online, they often feel that it makes more sense to go online. However, this choice usually escalates the conflict instead of resolving it. Too many tragic teen suicides have been linked to hateful comments, pictures, or videos posted on social networking sites by the students’ peers. In our discipline and counseling offices we invariably find that whatever the incident is, it either started online, or was escalated by comments made on Instagram, Twitter or by text messages. SnapChat is particularly dangerous because the appeal of the app is that it promises users that the image disappears after Continued on page 4