Grasshopper New Media Presents...

MySpace is here to stay.

Or did you just read “MySpace is the Devil!”, instead?

I’m not here to vilify or defend MySpace, or any other current technology. And I’m not really singling out MySpace in particular, but hey, those are the breaks when you’re the cool kid on the block.

Since it’s at the forefront of the media though, we’re all giving it thought these days. Teens with plummeting grades; the ever prevalent danger of kids being vulnerable to predators,-one can’t escape the media blitz on this subject. A vigilant parent must be attentive, it’s true.

But there’s another aspect I’ve been pondering. Stemming from my own recent personal struggle with redefining myself once I became a mother, I’ve begun to wonder about my own bedrock of perception and how it affects my reaction to new technology as it influences my child. Is it time to reassess my own perceptions before I come to conclusions about this stuff?

It’s a somewhat daunting idea that today’s landscape of social interaction is not only vastly different than what I grew up with, it’s also so completely intertwined with technology that it’s becoming a single entity unto itself. An entity which, realistically, is being instilled as a basic building block into our children’s development.

In other words, in my 2 year-old’s future mind, his idea of life without social networking, via his tablet PC, and his cell, will be no different than his idea of the Middle ages. Actually, they may end up side by side in his fifth grade History info download, in that chapter titled “The NeoDark Ages”.

Considering these differences, can I effectively use the social ideology built during my own childhood to adeptly parent? Or do I need to work on adopting a whole new model for myself, so that I can succeed in my lofty goal of teaching him the social ethics and mores necessary to advance the consciousness of humanity, thus making our world a better place?

The closest thing to MySpace that I had growing up was a yearbook. A yearbook… in all, it’s published once a year, sprinklings of color pages, passed around, and signed by friends-galore. Can you imagine if we had had a yearbook that came out everyday, played our favorite music, had updated pictures AND video AND was in heavy daily rotation among friends in the comments forum? Our grades may have plummeted too.

Cell phones? Only the lucky among us even had a phone in our rooms. Text messaging? Yeah, we all passed notes in class, living on the edge of danger if they were intercepted and read out loud.

This whole idea of social networking, technology, and how it pertains to our kids, truly is a new frontier of abundant applications. Considering all the socio-academic potential sends my brain into overdrive.

Visions of my son’s future experience in school morph into what amounts to an 80’s sci-fi movie. I see his educational environment involving a host of supplemental academia including virtual classrooms based on something like a souped-up MySpace model. A place where his teachers and peers collaborate in original user-created content, exchange research data via podcast, create their own specialized wikis, and collude on projects with their local and international student colleagues.

I imagine that with his portable PC and his cell phone in his backpack, he will have access to oodles of information, anytime, anywhere. While I’m transferring his lunch money and allowance to his cell for him to digital-spend, his social academics will be analogous to Montessori on steroids. Learn it, experience it, live it… all on the spot and in previously unconventional learning spaces. As our society moves toward a fully integrated digital lifestyle, where computers, phones, and televisions interface in complete sync, the capabilities are mind-blowing. Ideas on how to leverage these new tools to benefit kids should be at the forefront of all our minds.

I get butterflies.

With this promise of a new world of social academia, that lofty goal of mine (you know, the whole advance of the consciousness of humanity thing) actually seems somewhat less far-fetched.

It may all be starting with MySpace, but it has the yet unrealized capacity to lead to a generation of children who have much more of a sense of themselves as scholars, as actual creative contributors to their own education. Because it will eventually be global (if not almost so now), this new fangled social networking stuff will connect cultures in ways we have not yet begun to dream up. Kids will be culturally literate, diversity and inclusion will flourish. Could MySpace (and it’s descendants) bring us closer to, dare I even breathe it, World Peace?

I don’t know, but I do know I’ve answered my first question on whether or not I need to adopt a new model of thinking in order to help guide my son to his fullest potential.

Unequivocally…yes.

[tags]parents, kids, myspace, world peace, technology, global village[/tags]
Photo graciously provided by the Stuck In Customs under a Creative Commons license, some rights reserved