Growing up Online

“Growing up Online” was a pretty intense look at today’s youth using the internet in terms of communicating. It interviewed a handful of teenagers who basically spend most all of their free time on these sites ranging from blogs to myspace. It showed all angles of the spectrum from kids who just wanted to keep in contact with their distant friends, to girls who were using it to get attention using an alter ego. Some of these interviews were pretty disturbing. I never experienced these pressures that today’s teens are experiencing, so it came to a big surprise to me. It was crazy to me that a teenage girl who is fit, and a member of the swim team would result to eating disorders, and even being encouraged by other girls online to continue the disorder. Online sites that tell and encourage girls what little food to eat and when to purge is absolutely baffling to me. It also covered how unsafe the internet is due to online predators. I do not understand why these young girls are trying to get a thousand friends and accepting people’s friend requests that they have never even met. They are taking provocative pictures of themselves and letting these potential online creepers to peer into their profiles. If they kept their information discrete and only accepted friends they actually knew, this would not even be an issue. I just find it mind blowing how naive these teenage girls can be. I guess I just don’t understand considering when I was growing up I didn’t have these online socializing tools at my finger tips like today’s generation. It seems to me these kids are using these sites as a way to escape from their real lives. I think that instead of constantly being on their computes these kids should be going outside and being active. All these cases of kids committing suicide, getting perused by predators and encouragement of eating disorders wouldn’t be happening if they weren’t spending all their time on the internet, and instead getting out and doing something.
I definitely utilize Facebook but strictly for communicating with friends and family back home. It’s definitely a great tool, and I use it strictly for that purpose. I enjoy looking at my friends pictures, to see what they have recently experienced through travel, sports, and other functions that I missed out on. I live so far away that it enables me to stay close to my friends.