Staying current — for kids’ sake

By Joel Myhre (Contact) | The Daily Journal

Published Saturday, January 26, 2008

I admit, when I was a teenager, I spent my share of time staring at the computer.

However, my world of computers was a small speck compared to today. The computer I used, the Commodore 64, ran at about 1/100,000 of the speed and contained 1/100,000 of the memory of current computers. My work on the computer was relegated to a few boxy videogames, primitive word processor and spreadsheet programs.

E-mail and the Internet? Well, we actually owned a modem, and as I recall from our “Commodore clubs” back then, you actually could send and receive stuff via the modem. But only the smartest computer geeks in the world knew how to make them work. I’m fairly certain the Internet, if it existed in the mid-1980s, was only used by scientists and the like.

What’s more, I was certainly in the minority when it came to using computers. Myself and a couple of friends were basically considered geeks, and the “popular” kids certainly weren’t interested in such things.

While I haven’t been living in a cave for the last two decades, I wasn’t truly aware of how much the Internet has become such a part of teenagers’ lives until I watched a show on PBS this week.

Basically, it showed how teenagers are now spending a large chunk of their time online. And they’re not just playing games, either. They’re socializing, in the same way that we used to hang out at the bowling alley. They make lots of cyber “friends,” they upload photos and videos of themselves, some have even figured out they can bully fellow students on line, just like they did on the bus or in the lunchroom.

Again, I knew that sites such as Facebook.com and MySpace.com existed. Upon listening to a newspaper Web site guy at a seminar talk about how we in the newspaper business need to be “connected” to what the younger generation is doing online, I even signed up for a Myspace.com account.

The problem, as I found out, is that MySpace just isn’t designed for me. I filled in a couple of things about myself, but after a couple of minutes, became completely uninterested. I’m in my late-thirties, married, with a child, and a network of friends who, for the most part, are no different than my peers in high school. While they now use computers and the Internet, they don’t use it to socialize. It’s no wonder I had little interest in it.

The PBS show basically put myself in the place of teenagers: they’re still making their way in life, all of their friends are online, and there’s a world of other potential friends online with similar interests. As one student on the show said, “Myspace.com is like money; if you aren’t a part of it, you’re missing something.”

While such a trend might have fascinated me say, three years ago, today, it scares me. What frightens me the most are the stories of teenagers living secret lives online – from a girl in an online “club” of anerexics to another doing goth modeling to a boy who chatted with another about committing suicide, and then doing it — without their parents’ knowledge.

It scares me, of course, because my daughter, in less time than I want to admit, will be able to operate a computer, go online, and do the same sorts of things. She already likes to go online and look at the “Barney” games on the PBS Web site.

I’m not sure why it scares me so much. Maybe it’s because I just don’t want anything bad to happen to her. Or maybe it’s because I don’t want to lose touch with my daughter to the point where she would rather express herself through the Internet instead of talking to me. I’m not sure.

What’s sad is, it’s hard to know what will be available in 10 years, when she becomes a teenager.

I guess it’s up to me to stay on top of this technology stuff, just to stay on her wavelength.

jo