Ok, article is fairly lame when you look at the actual poll question, which revolves around the social development of young people. The headline made me think about harm/benefit in a more general sense.
I think they definitely alter the dynamics of how a kid comes to harm. Kid are mean. In school, some kid will be mean to you. With the help of facebook, twitter, texting, etc. every incident can become 100% public. Which sucks. On top of that, it is definitely eroding the barrier between home and school. The teasing, bullying, gossiping is active and highly connected 24-7 compared to when I was in school. In my teenage relatives, it's generated this sort of secretive paranoia. Everything is either verging on an exhibitionist act, or you live in dread of the one or two people you shared something with betraying you. Sure, high school was always like that to some extent, but it's had the volume knob turned up to 11, and there doesn't seem to be any fine gradations left.
As for physical harm and things like youtube, if you think that makes more kids act stupid, you never had a "here watch this" type of kid as a friend. For those kids 0-1 witness to impress is all it takes to do something stupid. For something epically stupid, it doesn't take much more than 2 witnesses, and you don't need the internet to find them when you are a kid.
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raz-00
Ok, article is fairly lame when you look at the actual poll question, which revolves around the social development of young people. The headline made me think about harm/benefit in a more general sense.
I think they definitely alter the dynamics of how a kid comes to harm. Kid are mean. In school, some kid will be mean to you. With the help of facebook, twitter, texting, etc. every incident can become 100% public. Which sucks. On top of that, it is definitely eroding the barrier between home and school. The teasing, bullying, gossiping is active and highly connected 24-7 compared to when I was in school. In my teenage relatives, it's generated this sort of secretive paranoia. Everything is either verging on an exhibitionist act, or you live in dread of the one or two people you shared something with betraying you. Sure, high school was always like that to some extent, but it's had the volume knob turned up to 11, and there doesn't seem to be any fine gradations left.
As for physical harm and things like youtube, if you think that makes more kids act stupid, you never had a "here watch this" type of kid as a friend. For those kids 0-1 witness to impress is all it takes to do something stupid. For something epically stupid, it doesn't take much more than 2 witnesses, and you don't need the internet to find them when you are a kid.