Goods and bads of social networking

Frontline takes us viewers inside the private worlds that kids are creating online, by raising important questions about how the Internet is transforming the experience of adolescence. At school, teachers are trying to figure out how to reach a generation that no longer reads books or newspapers. The fear of online predators has led teachers and parents to mainly focus on keeping kids safe online. But many young people think that these fears are outrageous. Online media has also intensified the significance of adolescence as teens create and play with identities on sites like MySpace and Facebook and encounter intense peer pressure in a virtual world. Parents are confused about how to respond to the increasingly private worlds inhabited by their children, lacking an understanding of both the creative potential and the genuine risks of this new cultural environment.

Frontline interviews kids, parents and educators about the experiences of youth, how they affect home life, identity, and education, and how kids online lives often spin out of their control. Adolescence is playing out, often in the physical world as well as the "always on" digital world of social networking web sites like Myspace and Facebook. Kids are extending their social world into an area without the adult order and supervision of their home, community and school environments. This often presents complex versions of classic issues (like bullying, a.k.a. "cyberbullying") that kids, parents, and schools are having a hard time understanding and adapting to.

Growing up provides access to the behavior and perspective of today's students that can help us find new connections to their ways of seeing the world, regardless of how those efforts are integrated into your way teaching.

The world has clearly changed for teenagers. Technology rules, and childhood or so the insightful documentary GROWING UP ONLINE posits will never be the same again. Over the course of Rachel Dretzin's film, parents, tweens, teens, scholars, teachers, and security experts make sense of the Internet’s impact on growing up. Is it really rife with bogeymen waiting to pounce and pitfalls that could determine no, ruin kids' future? Or is online life more about what you make of it?