BlueGin
Diamond Member
- Jul 10, 2004
- 24,544
- 16,998
(CNN) -- Remember when you were 12 years old and you'd pass notes in class, making snide remarks about members of the opposite sex?
Remember the electricity that shot through school when word went around that there was going to be a schoolyard rumble?
Remember the rollercoasters of emotions, the whispers of gossip, the crying because your best friend betrayed you, the molehills made into mountains?
If life is just like high school, then the Internet might be an age group lower. Much of our digital world means never having to leave junior high school behind.
Sure, the Web has plenty of mature, resourceful people who create clever online projects or crowdsource solutions to global problems. But some experts also believe it perpetuates childhood.
Janet Sternberg, a communications professor at Fordham University in New York who's written a great deal about online civility, sees a reverse of a pattern created by television. If, as cultural critic Neil Postman asserted, TV ended childhood -- the medium provided an impetus for young people to act older, which created hand-wringing about generations growing up too quickly -- the Internet has done the opposite, she says.
"The Internet and digital media have produced this 'Peter Pan effect' where we never grow up, we're perpetual children, we never have to be responsible for anything -- we keep this juvenile mentality," she says.
The Internet: It's like never leaving junior high - CNN.com
Remember the electricity that shot through school when word went around that there was going to be a schoolyard rumble?
Remember the rollercoasters of emotions, the whispers of gossip, the crying because your best friend betrayed you, the molehills made into mountains?
If life is just like high school, then the Internet might be an age group lower. Much of our digital world means never having to leave junior high school behind.
Sure, the Web has plenty of mature, resourceful people who create clever online projects or crowdsource solutions to global problems. But some experts also believe it perpetuates childhood.
Janet Sternberg, a communications professor at Fordham University in New York who's written a great deal about online civility, sees a reverse of a pattern created by television. If, as cultural critic Neil Postman asserted, TV ended childhood -- the medium provided an impetus for young people to act older, which created hand-wringing about generations growing up too quickly -- the Internet has done the opposite, she says.
"The Internet and digital media have produced this 'Peter Pan effect' where we never grow up, we're perpetual children, we never have to be responsible for anything -- we keep this juvenile mentality," she says.
The Internet: It's like never leaving junior high - CNN.com
thanks for sharing BG.....and no I wasn't the author 
