MediaSmarts Blog - (Online Hate)

The Boston Marathon tragedy has raised questions about the role the Internet plays in radicalizing youth and, more generally, how it may be used to perpetuate hatred. In Canada, similar questions are being asked about the radicalization of four London Ontario students in the wake of last January’s attack on an Algerian gas plant.

Someone encountering the Internet for the first time might be forgiven for assuming it was created specifically for teenagers. Indeed, the Internet could reasonably be said to have been aging backwards since its birth – the domain first of scientists and the military, then of university students in the 1990s and now children and teenagers. The same is true of many popular online environments: Facebook, once restricted to university students, is now just as popular with teenagers (indeed, recent research has shown that one in five 8 to 12 year-olds in the UK has a Facebook account, though the Terms of Service theoretically require you to be 13 or older). Whether it's social networking, Wikipedia or iTunes, the Internet is tailor-made for teens: an intensely social environment that nevertheless feels intimate, providing constant stimulation and instant results. Unfortunately, for the most part teens receive little instruction in using the Internet, and most of what is taught is specific technical skills rather than how to critically engage with online media and use the Internet wisely and ethically. One obstacle to teaching digital literacy skills is the assumption that teenagers already know them, and there is no question that they are tremendously fluent in their use of online tools and environments – but fluency is not literacy, any more than a tenth-grader fluent in English knows how to write a competent paragraph without being taught.

Ever since Cronus the Titan tried to swallow his son Zeus, parents have feared being supplanted by their children. (It didn't take.) But it's only in the last few generations, as the rate of technological progress has accelerated, that children have grown up in a world significantly different from the one their parents knew, and it's only very recently that parents have seen their surpass them while they were still in the single digits. Thanks to digital media, the world is changing so rapidly today – consider that five years ago there was no Twitter, ten years ago no Facebook and fifteen years ago no Google – that even those of us who spent our childhoods programming our parents' VCRs can feel left behind.