Ninad’s Blog

MY ESSAY…

Posted in Uncategorized on December 10, 2008 by ninad123

Essay Identities Frontlines: Growing Up Online Before we talk about the movie of “Growing up Online” we first need to know what the blogs mean. According to Wikipedia’s definition ‘A blog (a contraction of the term “Web log”) is a Web site, usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video.’ It basically means that blogs are your space which is maintained by you and are about you. There are different types of blogs such as Personal Blogs, Corporate Blogs, Question Blogs, By Media Types, By Device and By Genre. There are even some consequences of blogging; some are good while some are bad. Bad consequences are like Defamation or Liability, Threat to employment as well as Threat to Personal Safety. One of the good thins of blogging is Therapeutic Benefits. Therapeutic Benefits: Scientists have long known the therapeutic benefits of writing about personal experiences. Blogs provide another convenient avenue for writing about personal experiences. Research shows that it improves memory and sleep, boosts immune cell activity and reduces viral load in AIDS patients and even speeds healing after surgery. Even after a slow start, blogging rapidly gained in popularity. Blog usage spread during 1999 and the years following, being further popularized by the near-simultaneous arrival of the first hosted blog tools: • Open Diary launched in October 1998, soon growing to thousands of online diaries. Open Diary innovated the reader comment, becoming the first blog community where readers could add comments to other writers’ blog entries. • Brad Fitzpatrick, a well-known blogger started LiveJournal in March 1999. • Andrew Smales created Pitas.com in July 1999 as an easier alternative to maintaining a “news page” on a Web site, followed by Diaryland in September 1999, focusing more on a personal diary community,. • Evan Williams and Meg Hourihan (Pyra Labs) launched blogger.com in August 1999 (purchased by Google in February 2003) The movie “Growing up Online” that we watched shows the generation gap between the children and their parent (how did technology affect their lives), and also about how the children use their blogs and how much they depend on it. In the movie they have given two views on the point. Some people accept the fact about using the blogs and some people don’t like to use blogs. According to me children should be allowed to use their blogs, but in limited use. As I said I think children should be able use blogs as it can help them in many ways. They can even use it to communicate to different people. For example like in Iraq some people who are not allowed to meet each other or talk to each other can talk to them online or mostly on the blogs and get to know their personality, who they are, and all the things about them. Even some people can talk about the things on their blogs that they can’t talk in public, like for example Autumn Edows one of the actress in the movie who was a shy girl, got to open up and discovered who she was online on the blogs. Blogs can sometimes be used to get the views on different subject and if we are having some problems then we can post them on the blogs and some people can help us. We can even use it to share our opinion or our viewpoint any subject, like for example in China Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, the webpage is blocked by the Chinese government so we can take opinions from other people on the blogs and rise our message and make the people aware that even this things have happened in China. If you ask to most of the people in China about this incident they won’t know about it, because they are not exposed to it. In blogs you are can discuss from small things to world issues. As everything needs to have an opposition to it, the opposition shown in the movie was the parents and the media. Some parents think that the mistake one person made everyone will make that same mistake and for the reason the parent in the movie had the PTO in which they met together some day and discussed about their children, for example if a person accepts the person that they don’t know as their friend the parents think that their children made the same mistake and the media is the cause root to all of it as it just keeps showing it like after every 5 -10 minutes and so the PTO gets a new topic to talk about and so they stop their children from using the internet or their blogs / ‘Facebook’. As there is a positive side there is also a negative side to this point. If you add someone who you don’t know or don’t recognize there is always a threat of online bulling. Identity means your personality, attitude basically who you are. As far as identity is concerned on the Internet it’s good to have your true identity so that people will know who you are, what are you about, what are your interest, and all about you. As far as the internet threat is concerned, the US has launched a new agreement that MySpace agreed to: • Create a task force to develop age and identity verification technology to keep underage kids off its site; • Set up a registry of blocked e-mail addresses of minors, supplied by parents; • Make the profiles of members ages 14-17 “private” by default, meaning they can be seen by friends only; • Establish a “high school” section of the site for users under 18; • Respond within 72 hours to complaints about inappropriate content; and • Hire more staff to police such content as photos and discussion boards. As far as these rules are concerned, people won’t put any inappropriate content, but even children will put their age eighteen or older, no student is going to give their password to their parent, and even now a days the kids are so mature that they can just stop the blocks that their parent may have created, or just open the site that their parent want to see such as Britannica or any study site. When the press and the media interviewed the Producer Caitlin McNally about the shift in thinking she said, “Despite the research we did, I don’t think I was prepared when we started talking to kids for the extent to which the Internet and other electronic communication has permeated all aspects of being a teenager. Almost every kid expressed the utter importance of being connected with friends all the time and how unthinkable a life without that connection would be. I think a lot of kids were bemused by our list of questions about ‘life online,’ because they don’t sit around thinking about the Internet in their lives. It’s just there, always, another tool for them to use or place for them to go.” After watching this movie some people also talk about it on their blogs or on any other discussion forms. A guy named Will Plate talks about how he felt after watching the movie Growing Up Online, “The show opens with teens bringing their computers to a friend’s house to have video gaming LAN parties on a Friday night. That was me only few years ago. My best friends in high school were part of one of the top ranked clans in the world for the popular tactical first person shooter game Counter-Strike. One time crammed a few dozen kids and their computers into every nook and cranny of my parents’ house for a whole weekend of gaming and caffeine. We even created a website where we blogged about our mischievous teen exploits, which we thought was secure, until one day I walked into the computer room at lunch and everyone had it up on their screens. We learned our lessons at the very beginning of the adoption curve, before the stakes got too high. I spend a lot of time working with Gen X folks; I’m almost always the youngest person in any team. At 25, I often feel closer in culture to the teenagers in this documentary than my colleagues who are 30 plus. It’s become clear to me that current education and work structures are not well prepared for us Gen Y folks and our quirks. I’m hoping that will lead us to become a generation of entrepreneurs, of game changers.” After reading this review when I looked over myself I felt the same thing like him. Even I thought about how many multiplayer games I play and how many people I play with as well as how many friends I have on the Internet who I don’t even know or don’t even recognize. While I was going through ‘What we Leaned’ on the ‘Growing up Online’ website, which was the Question and Answers with the producers, there was a question I really liked which took the view of the producer Caitlin McNally on the question of the generation gap. “Q.: The report mentions that the Internet has created the greatest generation gap since rock ‘n’ roll. Caitlin, you’re in your 20s; did you experience that gap while working with these kids? McNally: More than once, I’d be trying to follow up with a kid and I would discover pretty quickly that the only way I could elicit a response was through a text message or social networking site. I would place call after call, or send e-mail after e-mail — nothing. But with a text, or a message on Facebook, a response would ping back within minutes. This phenomenon was a surprise; it made me feel old-fashioned — and old. I thought my experience would resemble that of the kids more than their parents, as I’m not a parent yet and certainly still empathize with being someone’s child. The majority of teenagers we talked to expressed good-natured exasperation that their parents “didn’t know how to work a computer” or barely understood text messaging. I was confident that because I’m completely comfortable using a computer, e-mail and a cell phone, I’d relate pretty quickly to how the kids we met communicate online. This was not the case. Writing an e-mail for a lot of the kids we talked to is equivalent to sitting down and hand-writing a letter for me. They described e-mail as a slow, archaic way to keep in touch with your aunt halfway across the country or apply for a summer internship. Even the most articulate kids who aced all their English classes could switch effortlessly into IM or text-speak; quick, pithy, shorthand Internet language was second nature to almost all the kids we met. They’re bilingual, and they intuitively understand an entire culture generated by the Internet, with customs and vocabulary that we had to learn step-by-step. Maybe even more striking to me was how social networking sites have become fully integrated into kids’ lives. I didn’t build my first profile until after college; it felt underground and novel, like being in on a joke. I’d never even heard the term “social networking.” Having a profile on the Internet was ancillary to my “real” life, while for the kids we met; it has become a fundamental element of what they do each day and how they represent who they are. When I built profiles [to communicate with kids] as we started working on this program, it was incredibly strange at first to find people from my own life popping up alongside my budding list of friends from New Jersey high schools. Anne Collier [president and editor of NetFamilyNews talks about how the Internet has fundamentally changed our notions of privacy. While the vast majority of kids we came across were absolutely comfortable posting their pictures, thoughts and conversations online, I felt acutely self-conscious about every word I typed that would show up on a site. This is where the generation gap was most palpable for me, and a senior at Morristown made me realize it. A lot of kids we met talked about taking pictures of yourself for your profile page using what they called “the angles”: You hold a camera — often your cell phone — at arm’s length, pose, and snap a head-shot. After learning this, I logged into my Facebook account one day to find a new comment on my profile picture. It was from the Morristown senior, and it read: “Someone’s got the angles…” Needless to say, I was completely mortified.” This interview basically says that the generation gap is so vast that people instead of using ‘old – fashioned’ types such as e – mail they would switch to their Facebook and type over there and so they will get the reply within minutes after you posted something so the producer instead of e – mailing she would just post on Facebook and she would get reply in minutes. It is also same with the pictures, if you take a picture you can directly send it from the phone because you have Internet connection in your cell – phone. This can be considered as freedom as you and communicate with people online just by using your cell – phone instead of going home, turning on the computer and then logging into your msn or your Facebook and then posting your picture online, and the greatest thing is that you can even get reply’s quickly when you post your picture on Facebook and you can decide based on peoples reviews whether the pictures you took were good or not and depending on that you can change your picture depending on the review your friends gave you. Like for example if you created something or took picture of something and posted on Internet even if you liked it people may say it’s boring or change the camera angle. Then you may change your picture by changing the camera angle or taking a new picture that looks even beautiful. As for the conclusion I think that the blogs are useful until you use it certain limitation like, not adding the people who you don’t know or don’t recognize, never criticize anyone on the blogs or they as well as you may get suspended due to your stupidity and don’t get too much addicted to the blogs as sometimes it may turn back on you. Bibliography. 1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blog 2) http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/kidsonline/etc/notebook.html 3) http://www.willpate.org/2008/02/03/gen-y-growing-up-online/ 4) http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/online/open/