Hi, “Teacher’s Lounge” readers, or as I like to call you, “Nate’s peeps”. Nate is on vacation, but he is so kindly letting me guest blog while he is away. My name is Erika and I am the Survey Services Coordinator here at Search Institute. Nate said I did NOT have to write about surveys, so I’m not going to. If, by chance, you genuinely are interested in surveys, my friend Survey Girl just started a little column you can check out.
A couple weeks ago, four co-workers and I attended a fantastic little play here in Minneapolis called Speech & Debate. It’s a funny, four-person play by Stephen Karam that was inspired by a recent scandal where a virulently anti-gay male politician was revealed to be conducting sexually suggestive online “chats” with a teenage boy. The play centers on three outcast teenagers who come together when they learn that one of their teachers has a similar secret.
Discussing the play afterward with my co-workers, we all felt that the play’s themes resonated with us as adults who work for an organization devoted to youth. A major theme presents the few adult characters (all played by the same actor) as either out of touch with or condescending to the students they interact with. High school student Diwata caustically wonders about a school administration that uses the euphemism “bathing-suit area” to refer to genitalia, but that also holds classes for its pregnant teens.
The heart of the play asks the question: What resources and avenues do youth have to express themselves? An emphasis was placed on the way these students communicated and eventually bonded. The play starts with students chatting via instant message and shows how the three misfits eventually come together over a podcast and a “private” blog. Diwata, Howie, and Solomon eventually interact IRL (that’s In Real Life) and form an unlikely friendship.
As a social media “evangelist” (follow me on Twitter!), I appreciated the play’s thrust of showing how technology can be used to form a community. We tend to think of social media—MySpace, Facebook, etc.—as tools of isolation; tools that are used to passively communicate while avoiding actual human interaction. Maybe to an extent that is true, but it is also true that these tools give us access to information and people beyond anything in our immediate realms. The Long-Tail was 2005’s meme, but I believe it can be just as true in online social interaction as it can for online business: the internet can act as a conduit in connecting people—even those people who are otherwise social outcasts or who have weird or obscure interests—as well as it can sell a large number of unique items.
I appreciated Karam’s refreshing, if realistic, take on social networking. The news is full of ways that technology is used to exploit. And while I absolutely believe that we should teach youth to use common sense and caution when interacting online, I think the benefits are often neglected and that we often mistrust any use of social technology by our children.
In the last three years, as we’ve migrated from MySpace to Facebook to dipping our toes in Twitter, it seems like it’s all become a bit…silly. Why do I need to “micro-blog” about everything I do anyway? But I think we’ve yet to see the power of our ever changing technology. I think our younger generations will find value and not just trendiness in each new social networking “fad”. They are already finding new bands on MySpace, joining “theater dork” groups and reconnecting with old friends from summer camp on Facebook, and sharing information with Rachel Maddow on Twitter. It’s easy to get overwhelmed, but keeping up with both changing technology and the new and various ways our youth are interacting is a worthy venture.
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