THERE is a new distraction in the classroom these days and it is far more insidious than the kind of thing schoolchildren have always got up to. As parents fret about what their youngsters are doing for hours on end, shut away in their bedrooms on their computers, it emerges that teachers, too, are *beginning to feel powerless in the face of the lure of social networking sites like Facebook.
Because it isn’t just at home that youngsters are “disappearing” into their virtual other-worlds.
At school they cannot resist accessing their favourite networking sites even during lessons and teachers are finding it increasingly difficult to stop them, out-smarted as they often are by tech-savvy pupils who simply log on using their mobile phones which have internet access.
While many head teachers hoped to prevent pupils getting on to sites like Facebook, Bebo and MySpace by disabling their school’s *computer networks to prevent internet *access, they hadn’t reckoned on today’s sophisticated mobiles. At least one head says this has forced him to lift his ban altogether.
With GCSE and A-level exams just weeks away, many youngsters cannot concentrate on their swotting when the enticement of the internet calls and it is so easy to log on, chill out and “chat” to friends from Southampton to Shanghai, from Halifax to Honolulu.
The latest concern about what online networking is doing to the Facebook Generation comes at the end of a week in which the site has been named in two high-profile murders.
First, serial sex offender Peter Chapman was jailed for life for kidnapping, raping and murdering 17-year-old Ashleigh Hall.
He lured the gullible teenager to her death after grooming her by posing as a handsome 19-year-old boy on Facebook.
Then came the case of Paul Bristol, 25, who saw photographs of his former girlfriend posted on *Facebook and took his bloody revenge. He was convicted of murder at the Old Bailey.
Earlier this month an inquest heard of the suicide of public schoolgirl Holly Grogan, 15, who plunged to her death from a bridge over a dual carriageway after being bullied by schoolgirls who had taunted her on Facebook.
Cyber-bullying is far from uncommon, nor is “cyber-racism” where unsuspecting youngsters are being recruited by the political Far Right.
Given such enticements, it is easy to explain the astonishing rise in popularity of Facebook, Bebo, MySpace and others in the short time they have existed, particularly among the young.
Just six years old, Facebook is by far the world’s most popular social networking site. It has risen from a facility for Ivy League students in the United States to a global phenomenon with about 400million users.
This enormous surge in popularity has propelled its 25-year-old founder Mark Zuckerberg from college student to the chief executive of an organisation that is currently valued at £7.6billion and which is on course to generate revenues of about £700million this year. In the UK it has more than 23million users, 5.3million of whom are teenagers.
Astonishingly, 96.4 per cent of all 13 to 32- year-olds have a Facebook profile.
There is also a disturbingly high number of under-13s illicitly accessing social networking sites, with a recent poll suggesting one in four – or 750,000 – eight to 12-year-olds in Britain evade the 13 and over age restrictions.
It is becoming typical of the internet age that such phenomena spring up at a pace that would once have been thought impossible. The speed at which Facebook has gripped the world has meant that concerns over the dangers it might pose have lagged behind.
Girls seem to be “permanently connected” to sites like Facebook and Bebo, president of the Girls’ Schools Association Jill Berry warned recently.
The issue now tops the list of parents’ worries by some way, she told the association’s annual conference.
But one area of concern which has been less well documented is over the longer term psychological effects of the enormous rise of online social networking on the young and impressionable.
How will teenagers who believe they have the world at their fingertips, even though they are not even leaving their own bedrooms, cope when their turn comes to take their place in the real world?
Some argue that these youngsters are chained by their addiction to the social networking sites which offer a seductive deception that could be profoundly psychologically damaging.
Far from offering freedom they are, in reality, an online prison where teenage users are isolated and not engaging in the kind of real-world social interaction they need.
Archbishop Vincent Nichols, head of the Catholic Church in England and Wales, has made public his fears about the role online social networking is playing in the fragmentation of modern society.
He has warned the sites are leading teenagers to build “transient relationships” which leave them unable to cope when their social networks collapse. He said the internet and mobile phones were “dehumanising” community life.
“I think there’s a worry that an excessive use or an almost exclusive use of text and e-mails means that as a society we’re losing some of the ability to build interpersonal communication that’s necessary for living together and building a community.
“We’re losing social skills, the human interaction skills, how to read a person’s mood, to read their body language, how to be patient until the moment is right to make or press a point.
“Too much exclusive use of electronic information dehumanises what is a very, very important part of community life and living together.
“Facebook and MySpace might contribute towards communities but I’m wary about it. It’s not rounded communication so it won’t build a rounded community.
“If we mean by community a genuine growing together and a mutual sharing in an interest that is of some significance then it needs more than Facebook.
“Among young people often a key factor in them committing suicide is the trauma of transient relationships.
“They throw themselves into a friendship or network of friendships, then it collapses and they’re desolate.
“It’s an all or nothing syndrome that you have to have in an attempt to shore up an identity; a collection of friends about whom you can talk and even boast.
“But friendship is not a commodity, friendship is something that is hard work and enduring when it’s right.”
AT the heart of the debate about social networking is the conflict between community and privacy. Mark Zuckerberg recently announced that young people no longer have the expectation of privacy, yet others argue that the appeal of Facebook is that it offers them a sense of a private space.
Social networking expert Danah Boyd said: “Kids have always cared about privacy, it’s just that their notions of privacy look very different than adult notions.
“As adults, by and large, we think of the home as a very private space. For young people it’s not a private space. They have no control over who comes in and out of their room, or who comes in and out of their house. As a result, the online world feels more private because it feels like it has more control.”
Yet many people worry that the feeling of being in control of an online existence is an illusion and one fraught with danger both from cyber-criminals in the short term and from those psychological demons spawned by our internet obsession that we can at present only guess at. 
LinkBack URL
About LinkBacks
New password-stealing virus targets Facebook 
Reply With Quote
Bookmarks