On Teenagers and the Internet: AKA, don't be a jerk.

The other night, during a break in my Material Culture class, my classmate Liz started telling our Professor about the whole Constance McMillen debacle. He hadn't heard of it at all, which is surprising considering how saturated liberal news media sites seem to have become in it. First, Constance couldn't wear a tux and take a girl to the prom. Next, they canceled prom so she couldn't go. Then, fake prom for her and a few of the special needs kids, while everyone else went to real prom. And now, Facebook groups harassing Constance, while others harass the teens bullying her.

The worst part, of course, is that very few of the teenagers harassing Constance have set up their privacy settings on Facebook, and as a result, the people harassing them have access to things such as, say, phone numbers. Addresses. Information about who their best friends are, who their relatives are. As Liz said last night, it's as if they're in complete ignorance of just how public a space Facebook is and how dangerous such a public space can be.

Now, do I agree with these teenagers? No. But that doesn't mean I can't worry about keeping them safe, both on the internet and in the physical world. Because they are kids. Because they deserve a chance to grow up and look back on their high school years and think "Man, I was a jerk".

For me, listening in on this conversation set off all kinds of alarm bells in my head. I've spent the past couple of weeks putting together a cover letter for a Youth Specialist Position, and have spent a lot of time thinking about why I want to work with teenagers as a result.

Because, let's face it: I'm only 23. High school was not all that long ago, and I didn't have a very good time there either. So when this job appeared, I found myself sitting there for a while, wondering what on earth I was thinking, applying for a job that involves working with teens.

Then, I realized: I care about what happens to them. I've got just enough distance from my high school years to realize that in high school, we were all young, most of us were stupid, and most of us were miserable, in some way or another. That hasn't changed at all in the past 6 years. I want to help teenagers be less miserable and be safer and be more prepared for whatever it is that comes after high school for them.

Part of that is information literacy instruction, both for teens and for their teachers. I remember being in class and having teachers tell me to just Google it when it was time to write papers. I didn't learn how useful databases were until I took my reference class in grad school. I'm pretty sure we had library trips in undergrad to learn how the databases work, but I'm also pretty sure none of them stuck, and I actually had no idea how many databases Smith had until I looked in to it last year during my reference class. And I know that a lot of teachers are STILL telling their students to "just Google it". My fiance admitted to doing it himself, saying he assumed that his students would be able to search intelligently and make judgments about the veracity and relevance of the information found. (At which point he was probably glad we're still long-distance, as he only had to deal with my enraged screech via Skype.)

But the other part is doing what I can to educate teens about the Internet. It's a public space that encompasses most of the world, and it seems like a lot of people don't quite grasp that it is. Children and teenagers growing up in this increasingly digital age are often not taught how to protect and represent themselves online, in many cases because their parents don't know how to either. Teens strike me as especially vulnerable, since this is a point in life when a lot of them are exploring and forming different identities, and a time in which the harsh words of their peers can have the strongest impact.