Parents and Teachers Surf the Social Networks Too

The other evening I indulged Chloe by watching Easy A with her. In it, the movie’s protagonist, Olive, a high school senior girl who is perpetuating a false image that she is promiscuous, is shocked to learn that her favorite teacher Mr. Griffith not only knows about all the rumors circulating about her, but also knows just how pervasive those rumors are. How does Mr. Griffith know so much? Mr. Griffith tells Olive he reads his students’ Facebook posts.

Today, parents and teachers tend to fall into one of two very distinct tribes when it comes to the social networking revolution. There are the cyber-reactive and there are the cyber-proactive. The first group observes little more about their teens and their world than previous generations. The second group observes at least a hundred times more, albeit through a distorted lens. Likewise, teens fall into two very distinct tribes. There are the cyber-dabblers and there are the cyber-broadcasters. And there are many more cyber-broadcasters (especially among teen girls) than one might expect.

In his famous work 1984, George Orwell envisioned that hierarchical totalitarian governments would leverage emerging recording, networking and communications technology to forcibly pull very private details about individuals online for an elite few to observe. Orwell never would have guessed that this technology once mature would actually have the converse effect. Private information is pushed not pulled and the pushing is voluntary not forced. Cyber-broadcasters quickly and efficiently promulgate both gossip and their own very private information. Online, a parent or teacher can easily monitor the pulse of the goings-on among high school students thanks to these cyber-broadcasters.

Orwell’s Big Brother government was clearly doing something unethical because it was observing people’s private lives against their will. In contrast, there has historically never been anything unethical about observing what was broadcast in the public domain. But given how much seemingly private information and gossip one can now observe on social networking sites like Facebook and Formspring, are teachers like the fictional Mr. Griffith and parents like me violating an emerging ethic by proactively observing?

I recently struggled with this question. To be fair, I think there are many teens at Hermes High School who would be as shocked and disturbed as the protagonist in Easy A to discover just how much I have observed about them by simply browsing what they and their peers have disclosed online where I can easily see it. If their parents would object to these teens putting this private information online (as many do) would they likewise object to teachers and other parents reading this private information once it appears in the public domain? A recent interaction made me ask myself these very questions.

There were perhaps fifteen parents including me sitting at a large table at a Hermes High School event for parents of students entering the honors program. We were discussing the social networking revolution, how it was affecting our teens and what we were doing about it. One mother said she permitted her daughter to use social networking sites but required her to friend her mother. Another mother said she required her daughter to give her mother her password. And a third mother told the group she knows and uses her daughter’s passwords without her daughter knowing it. When the topic of Formspring and cyber-bullying came up, yet a fourth mother told the group she did not permit her daughter Oleta to use Formsping.

Yikes, I thought. Whether Oleta’s mother knew it or not, Oleta was a serious cyber-broadcaster who had a very active Formspring account that I browsed from time to time. I discovered Oleta’s Formspring account roughly eight months earlier. The chatter about Erica losing her virginity had just started to die down when Erica worked her way back into the center of online and offline gossip by hooking up with two separate senior guys at the same party. While Erica’s hookups on that evening were tame enough to be filmed for a PG-13 movie, they brought Erica a new wave of notoriety. And with that wave, more detail about that evening’s shenanigans emerged. The same two senior guys also hooked up with a second freshman girl: Oleta. And if that wasn’t enough fuel for gossip to embarrass Erica and Oleta, the scope of the girls’ bad judgment was highlighted further when one of those two senior guys was arrested for a felony just two weeks later.

Erica and Oleta’s Formspring pages lit up with cyber-bullying. Erica shut down her Formspring account for months. But Oleta decided to stay online and fight back. And I was extremely impressed with how Oleta fought back with tenacity, courage and grace. She admitted to exercising bad judgment but also made clear her recreational exploits that evening—though wrong—had been quite tame. Oleta further posted that she believed she had learned a valuable lesson from her own error and hoped others would learn from her mistakes. She seemed to never tire answering each anonymous and signed post to her Formspring account from the most judgmental to the most supportive. And over time Oleta’s efforts seemed to pay off because the supportive posts began to far out-shine the judgmental ones.

I expect it was around a month after the actual hookups when Oleta’s mother saw the posts, experienced her own Yikes moment, learned a little bit about Formspring and then forbid Oleta from using Formspring. But Oleta never actually shut down her Formspring account. Instead she simply went silent for a few weeks. Once she got back on, Oleta resumed her cyber-broadcasting lifestyle. I’ve particularly enjoyed reading Oleta’s posts on Formspring because she’s displayed an unusually high level of depth and insight, and she’s proven in my eyes that it isn’t just in made-for-television movies that a victim of cyber-bullying can emerge stronger and more confident. When chatting with her mother, I could see further evidence of her daughter’s admirable qualities for stepping forward to participate in the honors program.

Oleta and others like her are the reason cyber-proactive parents like me and teachers like the fictional Mr. Griffith see one hundred times more (albeit through a distorted lens) than today’s cyber-reactive and all previous generations. While I wouldn’t advise a teenager to gossip or disclose so much private information online, a lot of it was already out in the open in the traditional gossip-laden public domain of High School. Formspring provided Oleta a way to gain some editorial control of the gossip in a venue where she could defend herself on a level playing field and emerge triumphant.

Since thinking, Yikes and hoping my expression did not give me away at the parent meeting, I’ve come to the conclusion that I am not violating any emerging code of ethics associated with the social networking revolution. If it is online, associated in some way with Hermes High School or my son’s peers and I can get to it by clicking hyperlinks, I will probably read it. If it is relevant or interesting, I will probably remember it. And if it provides an excellent illustrative story to reflect on teen life at this moment in history, I might even publish an anonymous blog post that includes it. On the other side of the equation, I’m teaching Philip and Chloe to be very cautious about what the post online or even text to a friend, because I know I can’t be the only cyber-proactive person out there.

With all that said, not everyone agrees with me. Some would violently disagree. While Oleta’s mother is developing into a very good friend to me and proving she is a great parent to her daughter, I don’t plan to tell Oleta’s cyber-reactive mother that I read her daughter’s online posts any time soon.

Formspring: Cyber-Bullying and Cyber-Fighting-Back

I wish I could remember the name of the made-for-television movie that ended with the bullied teenage girl holding the microphone at an all-school assembly defending herself and effectively saying “shame on you” to all the bullies who had harassed her and the many other bullying victims at her school. In the movie, the act served to empower not only the protagonist but also all of the other victims. Today, real-life heroines and heroes who have been victimized by bullies don’t need a school assembly, nor do they need to develop public speaking skills. The victims now have an excellent platform online on which they can defend themselves with valor.

Yes, I am actually talking about Formspring. Youth advocates and the media have been keeping a close watch on Formspring. By allowing users to post anonymous questions and comments to someone’s active Formspring account, a lot of the bullying that once happened offline has moved online and Formspring has become a significant cyber-bullying hub. Across the print and online world, one finds no shortage of writers firing off warnings to parents about the dangers of Formspring and encouraging these parents to protect their tweens and teens from the toxic allure of this emerging social networking jaugernaut.

Formspring has received a significant amount of bad press because it enables cyber-bullying. But there is more going on than merely cyber-bullying. What normally gets missed in these assessments is how Formspring empowers the victims to fight back. This important part of the story is only recently coming to light.

Before I proceed, I am aware that I am at great risk of being misunderstood. So I need to clearly state my position on some key issues. First, all forms of bullying and harassment including cyber-bullying are wrong. Second, teens and tweens need to be educated on just how wrong these behaviors are and how much real damage these behaviors cause. Victims of bullying and harassment suffer greatly and the most vulnerable go as far as committing suicide. Third, laws and school policies are woefully behind in addressing the problems and challenges that emerge as a result of the changes brought on by rapidly emerging technologies such as social networking. There need to be clear punitive consequences for bullying and harassment so that the victimizers will face justice and would-be victimizers will be deterred. And lastly, I realize that some teens and tweens will be so challenged by the online bullying that the empowerment this platform offers cannot offset for them the additional harm it enables their tormentors to inflict.

With that said, I believe most teens are savvier than we give them credit. Reading a recent blog post by Danah Boyd who researches youth online, I learned that Formspring staff now know that “a number of vicious questions were posted by the Formspring account owners themselves.” Is this rare? I don’t think so. Formspring cannot measure this behavior precisely because they can only observe it when the account owners post the “anonymous” messages to their own account when logged in. Logged off, the anonymous messages are even anonymous to Formspring. But the numbers are large enough that Boyd rules out hacking as a reasonable explanation.

It did not take me too long to find my own anecdotal proof of this seemingly self-harassing behavior. On the Formspring page of Brenda, a freshman at Hermes High School, a long raging post degrading her for having “huge, ugly, sagging nipples” appeared. (My version is much, much cleaner than the actual.) However, the person who wrote the post failed to notice that she hadn’t clicked the box to make the raging post anonymous. It was Brenda who wrote the cruel post, answered it and then published it to her own Formspring page.

Why would Brenda or any teen do something like that? Boyd suggests three reasons: A cry for help, a way to look cool, and a way to invite complements. Certainly, there are probably some self-harassers who are publishing such posts as a cry for help. As well, I have certainly observed that any time a teen publishes a particularly derogatory post, favorable posts (most of them not anonymous) soon follow. And lastly, Boyd correctly points out that teens can look quite fly (fly is the new word for cool) simply being un-intimidated enough to publish even the cruelest words that arrive on Formspring.

But I see something deeper. The words Brenda published were carefully crafted. I think they were meant to sound like someone in particular. Perhaps Brenda was even quoting the exact words that had been directed at her in the girls’ locker room. Using the anonymity of Formspring, I think Brenda and others like her e-personate their real or assumed offline tormentors and thereby create a platform where they can defend themselves and effectively say “shame on you” to gossips and bullies who may never have done any actual cyber-bullying. And on Formspring it is there for everyone to see. Brenda might have had even one more item on her agenda. She might have wanted the post to draw boys’ attention to her chest so that they could draw their own conclusions. The point to take away is that Formspring gives account holders (especially savvy, creative teens) a huge amount of power to influence how they are viewed. Account holders can delete the posts they do not want published and answer the posts they do want published, even if they need to author the anonymous posts themselves.

For parents who want to protect their teens and tweens, requiring them to shut down their Formspring accounts may be the right decision or it may merely take away the best defense they have against the gossips and bullies. For most teens and tweens, I think it would be the latter. Merely having a Formspring account is a way for victims like Brenda to say to every bully and would-be bully “bring it on” and in my mind that is pretty darn fly.

Boys Pick Up Where the Medications Leave Off

With the exception of a few polite greetings, I have never personally interacted with Philip’s peer, Ophelia. But I have interacted a lot with Ophelia’s mother. Ophelia’s mother is part of my extended network of proactive parents in the greater Hermes area. Among those she trusts, Ophelia’s mother openly discloses Ophelia’s basic struggles on both a short-term and long-term basis and occasionally provides specific details.