Teenagers in the News

Teenagers in the News

"Teaching Teens about Harassment" by Stephanie Clifford

This article is about how three teenage girls in Greensburg, PA got were charged with disseminating child porn. All three of them had sent nude pictures of themselves via text to their boyfriends who were all charged with possession of child pornography. According to the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, about twenty percent of teens have either posted or sent nude pictures of themselves through cell phones. The Family Violence Prevention Fund has labeled the sending of nude photos as a form of digital dating violence. Because of some highly publicized cases, parents are just becoming aware of how much teens can access through all the technology available to them in this day and age.

Teens shouldn't be taking nude photos of themselves and sending them to anyone. By doing this they are putting themselves at risk. These pictures can be shown or sent to anyone and teens at this age can't be trusted to keep these photos to themselves.

I don't necessarily agree that the teens involved in this article should have been charged with porn, but I believe they are using them as guinea pigs to make an example and to try and stop this behavior from happening.

"Teenagers' Internet Socializing Not a bad Thing" by Tamar Lewin

The study in this article was done by the MacArthur Foundation and basically says that parents shouldn't be worrying so much about what their teenagers are doing online for so long because they are learning technological skills and literacy that's going to help them succeed in the world. The main reason teens go online is to socialize with their friends, not to get into trouble. Teens say the Internet and technology is an addiction and you can't live without it. Today's youth have more motivation to learn from their peers than they are to learn from adults.

This article mostly makes me think of the Marc Prensky article "Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants," because technology is so much a part of teens lives and previous generations don't really understand the need and obsession with it because they didn't grow up with all these fun technologies.

Something I didn't really like was how the article stated that predators and stranger danger have been overblown. There are many incidents of teens talking online to strangers and eventually meeting up with them and they end up disappearing or being found murdered.

"What's the Buzz? Rowdy Teenagers Don't Want to Hear It" by Sarah Lyall

This article was completely absurd. Howard Stapleton from Barry, Whales came up with a plan to keep rowdy teens from hanging outside stores and causing trouble. He invented a device (called the Mosquito) that emits a high-frequency pulsing sound that can be heard by most people under the age of 20 and almost no one over the age of 30. This sound is designed to irritate young people and after a few moments it irritates them so much that they end up leaving. Howard Stapleton was quoted saying "It's very difficult to shoplift, when you have your fingers in your ears."

I don't really agree with this tactic at all. I think this device is a little inhumane. It's basically treating the teens like animals. This device is pretty much a dog whistle for humans. Reading this made me think of Thomas Hine's "The Rise and Fall of the American Teenager" because teens are being viewed as pests and being driven away by a machine called the mosquito. The teens aren't being understood by the shop owners in this article and they don't really know how to handle it so instead they drive them away.