In the case of the MySpace lawsuit of 2006, a 14 year-old girl and her mother filed a lawsuit against MySpace after the girl met with a man she had contact with over the website. The meeting started out with dinner and a movie, but ended with the girl getting raped by the 19 year-old man.
In Kevin Alexander’s essay titled, “MySpace Not Responsible for Predators”, he places the blame on the mother and the daughter stating that “The girl, as traumatic as her experience was, should be held responsible, too.” His reasoning being that, the girl, at 14 years, was old enough to, “Calculate Risk” as well as have “Other higher brain functions.”. Who is to say that 14 year-olds have that kind of brain function? Today, adolescents and young adults are declared incapable of being responsible enough to make their own decisions such as buying cigarettes, getting a credit card, or a tattoo. If today’s youth are not capable to see the long term consequences, why is this girl being criticized and blamed for not observing the potential outcome of her actions online? Though it can be true that the m...
Many young girls are aware that what they are doing on the internet can be seen by others and it can lead to positive or negative reactions from their peers. Orenstein is concerned about younger girls and women and how social media could take a bad turn on things for them. She wants us to know that social media can damage one’s reputation depending on how it is used. Girls post pictures of themselves on the internet in order to attract positive attention from their peers, as well as others who are considered as strangers. They want to be able to seek the attention from others in order to create an audience. As a result of this, Facebook is then used as a “social norm”, meaning that people can judge and form opinions based off of what is seen in an online profile. Orenstein explains that she isn’t trying to put technology in a bad light, because she uses it to keep in contact with her friends and family. She’s mindful about what she puts on the internet, while young adults are making their identities into a
The article ‘Web of Risks’ by Brad Stone, is about how young adults misuse social media and there are consequences. Cameron Walker, a sophomore at Fisher College had organized a petition dedicated to getting a campus security guard fired and put it on Facebook. Marc Zuckerberg designed Facebook in 2003 and it is a well-known website used worldwide. On the Facebook page Walker wrote that the security guard harassed students and needed to be eliminated. His plan backfired due to his use of wording and it came off threatening so he was expelled. Social media is looked at as a way to express yourself. Different social networks are used such as Facebook, Bebo, and Myspace. On these sites sometimes personal life is published,
Higher education law attorney Dana L. Fleming voices her controversial opinion in favor of institutionalized involvement in social network protection in her article “Youthful Indiscretions: Should Colleges Protect Social Network Users from Themselves and Others?” (Fleming). Posted in the New England Journal of Higher Education, winter of 2008 issue, Fleming poses the question of responsibility in monitoring students’ online social networking activities. With a growing population of students registering on social networks like Facebook and MySpace, she introduces the concern of safety by saying, “like lawmakers, college administrators have not yet determined how to handle the unique issues posed by the public display of their students’ indiscretions.” However, while Dana Fleming emphasizes the horror stories of social networking gone-bad, she neglects the many positive aspects of these websites and suggests school involvement in monitoring these sites when the role of monitoring should lie with parents or the adult user.
Each day Americans make decisions that affect the outcomes of their lives. Some choices are easily made, while others require intense thought. The consequences of actions, nonetheless, are known from as early on as childhood. For example, a small child knows immediately that he or she can thrust their hand in a fire and feel the consequences. However, Mr. Raeburn states, “teenagers cannot be held fully responsible for their actions because all the wiring to allow adult decision making isn’t completed yet” (517). Still, teenagers can be held responsible for operating a vehicle, and be held accountable to obey traffic laws. These illustration...
She starts off her argument with her own personal experience then transitions into an example of a girl she interviewed named Caitlyn. She uses Caitlyn as an example to show that teenagers start posting their everyday lives from a young age. Caitlyn likes to post her blogs, her photos and documentaries about her school on the internet for the world to see. She has the characteristics from the author’s previous argument that she thinks she has an invisible audience on the internet and because of this she posts her daily routine. When Caitlyn took a trip to Manhattan, she posted her pictures and “memories of her time in New York [which] are [now] stored both in her memory, where they will decay, and on her site” (Nussbaum 3). During this argument, the author only uses examples of her personal interviews; she does not have any facts from credible resources. If the author where to include more personal examples of teenagers, it would not give the reader the suspicion on whether or not this is true for all youth. If teenagers thought about the consequences of posting online their daily lives, than many people would not do it. By taking this argument into consideration many people would be more careful about what they post. The online world can be a scary place because pedophiles can now have easy access to photos and teenagers accounts and pretend to be someone they are not. Young adults
As it was mentioned in the article, “Let kids Run Wild Online”, kids want to have freedom and a place place where they can have some privacy, a place where they can explore the world and themselves without their parents haunting them. Now, we don’t see as many kids in the streets due to the dangers they can encounter. Therefore, teens use internet to have some freedom and some time for themselves. Now days, parents concentrate a lot of their attention in their kids which is completely understandable considering their concern about their kids’ safety. Although, I agree that parents need to give their kids their space in the internet considering that the internet is now an important source of freedom and sometimes the only source of freedom for teenagers. Over protective parents also harm their kids by not letting them learn from their mistakes, kids are not developing the skills to confront the struggles of the world, and kids won’t really know what their personality without their parents watching them all the time. The best way parents can help their children is not by motoring what they do in the internet but by having good communication with their kids and by teaching them values and morals because their kids will encounter dangers wherever they go and parents can’t be with them all the time. Therefore, parents must teach their kids what to do in a situation of danger or even how to avoid those situations.
Juveniles are not mature enough or developed psychologically, and, therefore, do not consider the consequences of their actions. In the article, “Startling Finds on Teenage Brains” by Thompson,
The Internet is an immense database that provides users with a tremendous amount of information on research, commerce, and entertainment. Unfortunately, as the internet keeps advancing, online predators continue to become more successful in what they do. The internet is an ideal network for pedophiles to pursue their interests and fixations with young children. It enables them to locate and interact with adolescents more rapidly than ever before. Although the idea of pedophiles luring children in on the internet is a horrifying image, it is happening. It is through the internet’s easy accessibility that children continue to become vulnerable to these internet predators while engaging in social networking sites.
Parents should not be held accountable for their child’s crime(s). When a young adult reaches 18 years of age, they’re considered adults, able to take on more responsibilities, including taking responsibility for their own crimes. Most adults are quick to judge against the actions of children, and it is said that teenage behavior comes back to the way they are and were raised. However, the curiosity of young children and teenagers is unquestionable; all teenagers engage in curiosity. Most young adults are curious to try different things.
However the faulty policies that are made by the sites are potentially putting users at a high risk which consequently leads to the affection of their social impressions. Evidently, Facebook likely is not the most appropriate entity to be the arbiter of whether or not academic researchers should obtain consent from individuals to collect their information (Solberg, 2014, p. 800). The terms and condition legalities notwithstanding, users can and should question the terms and conditions of the platforms on which they contribute content, conduct exchanges, socialize, communicate, and otherwise interact. Understanding the conditions of use on these sites allows users to better assess, and advocate for, the levels of influence and control they consider acceptable on the sites they use (Stein, 2013, p. 368). Some of the consequences of sexting are prioritizing humiliation as ‘the worst’ consequence for girls, and criminalization as the most important consequence facing boys (Karaian, 2014, p. 288). As a whole, social media are inevitable in terms of a daily entertainment for teenagers however they usually become victims as of misunderstanding certain terms and conditions offered by the sites; and they might become sexually abusive by offending a victim through sexting (does not matter which gender; heterosexual or
Social media can have detrimental effects on the formation of an adolescent’s identity such as social isolation meaning that the individual will spend excessive amounts of time attached to any electronics that will provide him with social media access. Social networking has been debated to have beneficial or detrimental effects, as overuse and abuse of the Internet can be harmful to someone, such as an adolescent. According to the National Crime Prevention Council, over one million teenage girls are victimized psychologically as well as physically, through social media.
Osborn, Clair. "Teen, Mom Sue MySpace.com for $30 Million." 20 June 2006. Austin American-Sttesman. .
Social Networking sites and application are an increasingly entwined part of our everyday lives. We use them to communicate with friends and family all over the globe, to chat with friends down the hall to decide where to eat, to network for jobs, and to connect with others with similar interests.
Many children have access to the internet and are able to search up anything on Google. As with any type of media, there are positive effects and negative effects. Some of the negative effects of the internet for children are that ,since, children and adolescents are more or less technologically savvy than their parents, they are able to search about just about anything and and talk to just about anyone on the internet, this can lead to some very dangerous situations. According to the Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, “89% of adolescents report using a computer, 61% report “surfing the net,” and 14% report seeing something that they do not want their parents to know about.” (Villani, 2001) 14% of adolescents reported seeing something that they did not want their parents to know about, this shows how unsupervised the internet is and shows how the internet can lead adolescents to become secretive and , maybe, even violent. Again, this leads to deviant behavior that the child learned from the internet. In addition, according to the Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, “... a profile of the recent school killers, noted that almost all were computer-savvy and frequented sites where they could obtain violent, anarchist-oriented material.” (Villani, 2001) This shows that websites that have violent material on the
Yesterday, I was in a very reflective mood and I realized how disconnected we have become. I am the first to admit that you guys are old enough to figure it out on your own but then I realized I also have a responsibility to family and that is supporting and checking in with you all. I care about what you do and the image you put out there. Some of us are already in relationships, seeking relationships or had relationships and the very young ones have not embarked on that venture. Obviously, we all have busy lives and it is going to be difficult getting you all together but what I have learned that life is unpredictable and we need to take time to connect. Therefore, I am employing all of you to connect at least once a month face to face or through social media. It must be done and should be a priority from now on. It is obvious that we all have our own truths but what is actually hurtful is the growing misunderstanding about how we feel about each