THEME: Real World Connections

Lesson: Virtually lost generation: a viewpoint written by Naomi Lakritz for the Calgary Herald

Learning Outcomes:

  • Students will examine and discuss the impact of the electronic world on kids today

Essential Question:

  • Are young people today spending too much time in an electronic and artificial environment, missing out on necessary social interactions? Are our parents raising children who will be ill equipped to relate to and develop empathy for others? Is a dark cloud on the horizon?

Level:

  • grades 9-12

Time:

  • 1 x 15

Materials:

  • article attached: Virtually lost generation: by Naomi Lakritz, writer for the Calgary Herald

Procedures

  1. Write the essential questions on the board.
  2. Have a student read the article Virtually lost generation to the class.
  3. Say, in this article, Miss Lakritz pints out that out suburban yards are empty, no-one is playing in the parks and the swings hang empty. What are your observations? Is this generation “overdosing” in the electronic world as she suggests?
  4. Questions:

Should parents be setting some limits when it comes to computer time, gaming, TV etc.? What do you feel is reasonable?

Does our reliance on Facebook, MySpace, texting, etc. make teens/adults “one-dimensional” and “emotionless” or the opposite?

Why do we prefer to text instead of talk with our friends?

Why do people say things through text/msn etc? that they would not say in person? Do we text/msn etc. because we are afraid to talk?

Thousands of people watched Abraham Briggs commit suicide on the webcam. Many encouraged Abraham to kill himself. Does this electronic world make us emotionless and begin to see real life as fantasy?

If the electronic world suddenly “vanished”, how would it affect your life? (No cell, computer, ipod, etc.)

Virtually lost generation

By Naomi Lakritz who writes for the Calgary Herald

Are the virtual chickens coming home to roost? Looks that way. In the last little while, here’s what has happened. Recently, Abraham Briggs, a 19 year old FloridaUniversity student killed himself in Miami while his webcam was on, as an online audience urged him to take his own life. Only a few people phoned the police, who reached Biggs too late to save him.

“It’s a person’s life that we are talking about. And as a human being, you don’t watch someone in trouble and sit back and just watch,’ said Bigg’s father. Abraham Sr. Well, you might just sit back and watch if you live in an electronic world, where everything on the screen in front of you has an egalitarian meaninglessness.

Ashley Grills, 20, testified in court two weeks ago that she dreamed up the MySpace persona of a fictitious boy whose messages to 13 year old Megan Meier drove her to suicide.

Grills said she invented the boy so that her employer, Lori Drew, could find out what Megan had been saying about her daughter, Sarah. Apparently, it didn’t occur to Drew to approach Megan’s mother with her concerns, talk Sarah how to deal with it herself, or simply ignore the sniping that is typical among pubescent girls. Drew, who lives in St. Louis, is charged with conspiracy, a month other computer related charges.

Nov. 20 was declared Kick a Ginger /Day by a group on Facebook, inspired by a SouthPark episode on the same theme. Across Canada, red-haired kids were bullied and kicked, in Calgary 13 kids were suspended for joining the bullying. And everyone knows the story of Brandon Crisp, 15, of Barrie, Ontario who was found dead a couple of weeks ago after running away from home because his parents were upset with the addiction that had him up at four a.m. playing video games.

It used to be that when advocacy groups pointed accusing fingers at TV and claimed it made kids more violent, the baby boom generation would point out that they had watched thousands of hours of Mayhem on Saturday morning cartoons and yet they had grown up just fine. That point is valid, because there is a difference between then and now. The baby boomers only had TV. The rest of the time they were outside playing with their friends and interacting with the real world around them. They had balance. In fact, they had more than balance because real world interaction filled the major portion of their day.

Today, kids spend their days in front of one electronic screen or another, moving from the TV to the Internet to the video games. An when they are out and about, they take their electronic bubbles with them, far from interacting with the real world, they are absorbed in testing friends, or are plugged into their iPods, oblivious the world around them. Suburban yards are empty, city parks are devoid of children. Drivers inch their cars through playground zones wondering why the zones exist; nobody’s ever at the playground and the swings hang empty day after day. The kids are all at home overdosing on Facebook, playing video games, texting friends or watching TV. They are growing up in a frighteningly one dimensional and emotionless electronic world.

Just like the kid who pigs out on junk food faces obesity with all its attendant ills of diabetes and high cholesterol, so does the kid who pigs out on electronic toys suffer by failing to make healthy connections with other people in the real world. When everything is on a screen, nothing is real and that includes other human beings. What kind of effect does this immersion in a virtual world and its accompanying sensory deprivation have?

Flickering electronic images do not teach children empathy for others; they sit isolated in the comfort of their homes and are not required to feel anything except the mouse or the game controller at their fingertips.

Abraham Briggs and his pain were no more real to the kids who goaded him into committing suicide that a video game character who meets a violent end. So he banished from the screen….so what? Click on the next link or image and move on. And so what if kids decide to gang up on redheads at school? Nothing in their electronic world has taught them to care about anyone else. That Drew and Grills preferred to deal with Megan Meier’s behavior by creating a virtual persona to harass her, rather than sit down and have a real world chat with her and her parents is alarming. So is the fact that Brandon Crisp was so deep in his electronic world that he could not cope when it was withdrawn from him.

“I would not want to see anything like that on the internet and not try and get help for that young man. I think that is what….any normal person would do,” Biggs Sr. said of his son’s suicide.

Trouble is, increasingly abnormal people are being raised, people who’ve spent their crucial developmental years in an overwhelmingly electronic and artificial environment, missing out on the social interactions that led past generations to relate to, and develop empathy for others. Maybe the chickens haven’t yet come home to roost, but that dark cloud on the horizon is the flock starting to gather.