cyber-responsibility

What impact could educational blogging have on your students?

            My great hope in this dawning age of inter-connectedness is that we begin to actualize our potential to harness doing good for the planet and one-another.   I have already spoken at some length about the positive outcomes of blogging for the betterment of the community at large, and yet with great power comes responsibility. 

It would appear that all the snags in the digital fabric have not been entirely ironed out.  It would seem that this age of convenient miracles that makes us all storytellers, with the ability to take our message to a global stage is at once exhilarating and yet somehow terrifying.  This seems to be the elephant in the room that I’ve yet to run across in any of the readings. 

What I find lacking in all these discussions on the wonders of the modern age is a healthy respect for each other or to coin a phrase “cyber-responsibility”.  It is one thing to harness the potential of technology, but quite another to teach young people how to act in a morally responsible way towards their fellow citizens.  What seems to be missing from the conversation is teaching our children how to be upstanding, moral people. 

            The case in point I am referring to is the suicide of a 15-year-old girl named Audrie Pott in Santa Clara County, CA, who recently took her own life late last year. She passed out at a party after drinking, was allegedly raped, and pictures were subsequently posted on the Internet.  After being cyber-bullied by her peer group, the last thing she wrote on her Facebook page was that day was “the worst day ever”.

 http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/lookout/yahoo-news-interview-lawyer-audrie-pott-family-press-211805711.html

Given the tools available to a young person, say 20 years ago, they would have to take the pictures, have them developed, and then mass distribute them around the school.  There would have been a few more checkpoints along the way for some sort of intervention and for the perpetrators to think about their actions.  With these new tools in the hands of young people, it’s as simple as point and click. 

            The questions I would like to ask are: what would lead any young person to think that sort of abhorrent behavior was acceptable?  Why would no thought go into their actions or their possible outcomes and repercussions upon the victim?  This vast network may have connected us, but it can as easily become a fortress where anyone can shoot arrows without really having to see their consequences and others can be baited like hapless victims, completely powerless to do anything about their plight. 

Just as any Web tool has the potential for mismanagement, we should be wary of the ability to do wrong to others.  This is an issue we need to address with our young people; how to interact on this digital landscape, lest we have others fall prey to the same fate.