Growing Up Online

The show gives the perspectives of both adults and the “digital generation” (namely middle school and high school students).

The show also explores some darker topics like some questionable, if not pornographic photography and even suicide. I think all of this shows that the internet can be a sketchy place, especially if you’re new to it.

As I watch “Growing Up Online” in 2017, I can’t help but feel like it’s now talking to an older and hopefully wiser audience than it was almost eight years ago.

Yes, the special explores some valid concerns that still hold up today. For instance, using online sites to cheat and plagiarize from is still a concern, but now, online resources are often one the main tools for doing research or studying. The internet today is more of a tool for students than it is a scapegoat.

Yes, online predators are still a thing, but as the documentary pointed out, people generally know to avoid sketchy people online if they get in that situation.

I think some of the more serious questions shown in the documentary are still not fixed. Plenty of people still put out pictures and videos that they probably shouldn’t. Cyberbullying-spurred suicides still make news. But overall, I feel like we are better-equipped to handle those situations today than we were back in 2008.

Some of this just seems so common sense, but again, we’re the generation that has grown up online. The internet was a much different place eight years ago and so much has changed. We, as the generation that takes the internet for granted, don’t really understand that the internet was pretty new at the time. Sure it had been around for a while, but it was developing and infiltrating people’s homes and they didn’t know how to handle it. Our parents had a right to worry like they did in this documentary. We were the learning curve.

I think it’s easy to laugh off the film as naïve and perhaps a little overdramatic, but that time stamp matters. That documentary was made in 2008 and featured high school and middle school kids being dumb on the internet. While it’s easy to say “wow kids, stop. You’re being dumb,” we fail to notice that we were those kids not that long ago. We were in their shoes. Perhaps we weren’t making all the same mistakes at the same intensity, but we can probably think of someone who did.

The internet was a new frontier a decade ago. Now, it lives with us and we can’t live without it. We are the digital pioneers. Have we tamed it? Certainly not. But we are getting used to it and it doesn’t seem quite so scary anymore. I think that’s the biggest difference between us in 2008 and us now.

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