The age of the internet has changed many things about growing up. The people whose parents took photos of them for Myspace and Facebook are now approaching their twenties. A recent MIT review asked if having their childhoods made permanent by the internet was for the better, or the worse.
Many social movements were launched over the internet this decade, famously exposing celebrities like Kevin Spacey and Bill Cosby as predators. The #MeToo movement and others revealed the power the internet can have, unifying hundreds of millions of people together for a single cause. Though, not every situation is as unanimously admirable. Many of those punished by the masses were public figures who were well into adulthood. The permanent and searchable nature of the internet leaves every word up to scrutiny.
Recently MIT Technology Review examined the downsides to having an internet where every action is documented for the rest of time and how it could potentially be especially harmful to the world’s youth. In particular, they cited a 2015 New York Times report that discovered Facebook was seeing a billion photographs uploaded to its site daily, with many of them taken by the younger generation. Social media also exposes them to the broader world far earlier than their parents were. The article raises some points about how young people are unfairly scrutinized for their gaffes on the platform, making a note of a situation where a high school senior shared a post of Snoop Dogg holding what looked like marijuana, only to be suspended from the school for “engaging in inappropriate sexual and drug propaganda.”
Twitter Turmoil
There’s a popular opinion that people are unfairly punished or “canceled” on social media. While the viciousness of the net has been well documented, the issue feels a bit overstated. There’s a difference between a fifty-year-old CEO getting canceled for insensitive comments they made a decade ago, and the twenty-year-old who pulled a fire alarm at fifteen. If anything, institutes need to be more understanding that growing up is different now. Kids are crass and often absurd with their humor, and the older generations have a habit of holding the younger groups to norms that aren’t shared by people who are going to fill their shoes.
It’s a bit exaggerative to say that the adolescent years are hurt by heightened scrutiny. When people talk about how people are prudish nowadays, it’s hard to not think of it as a desire to commit egregious action that should have been punished but didn’t. This year exposed a series of photos of Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau wearing blackface in his youth. If that had happened today, it’s more than likely that his political career wouldn’t have gotten far as it did.
Source: MIT Technology Review