Elizabeth-04-08-2012+HALR+Chapter+18

Elizabeth-04-08-2012 HALR Chapter 18

If I had a child, he or she would have been 18 years old by now; I would have understood the life of adolescents in the 21st century better. Is it all hype that they are living in a literally virtual world? I have to believe what the book says. It seems that my sister in law is connecting to her high schools pals scattered all over the world via face book. I believe she lives in a virtual world more than her adolescent children. If in 2012 people in their 40s and 50s have established online lives: relationships, jobs, entertainment, health, spirituality, etc; how much more will the 2035 men and women in their 40s be tied to their online lives? Our work, leisure and academic lives are tied to the internet. I would feel lost without it, but I fear that teens and adults will miss life as we used to know it. We now hide behind the screen. In defense of the internet I could say that now we don’t have to commute to submit a print paper, we don’t have to have teachers managing us in a classroom, students don’t have to listen to a teacher they don’t particularly like (I once had a teacher who had such a loud voice I got a headache after every class), or be confined in a classroom with classmates. They can study and choose who to study with. On the other hand, face to face social interaction will be less and less. Although we will be sitting “in the privacy of our homes” working on the internet, our lives are totally public. We will have a public identity and a private one and the line will be blurry. Goodbye privacy of thought. We are now open books. People can peer into our writings, ourselves, our lives. People can access what websites you’ve been to, how much money you make, what your interests are, what you wrote when you were young and impulsive, they can dig everything about you and make inferences. All users of the World Wide Web have public identities which they create and might regret having created them one day.