MediaSmarts Blog

Like it or not, if you use the Internet you have an online identity. Some people call this your "brand." What's a brand?

Not only was 2012 a year of rebranding and change, we were also very busy at work updating our resources and creating brand new lesson plans. We released 21 new and updated lessons on a variety of topics from bias and crime in the media to free speech and the internet and challenging hate online.

Not only was 2012 a year of rebranding and change, we were also very busy at work updating our resources and creating brand new lesson plans. We released 21 new and updated lessons on a variety of topics from bias and crime in the media to free speech and the internet and challenging hate online.

The new movie Zero Dark Thirty, which tells the story of the tracking and eventual killing of Osama Bin Laden, has received several Oscar nominations (including Best Picture), but it's attracting another kind of attention as well: several writers, including Jane Meyer at The New Yorker and Peter Maass at The Atlantic, have accused it of condoning or even glorifying the use of torture by US intelligence agencies.

It's been a big year for our website! We've redesigned it from the ground up to make it more up-to-date, comprehensive, and easier to search. Our users have responded enthusiastically to the new look and feel.

As we come to the end of 2012, we reflect on the busy and exciting year that just passed. We’re ending the year with a new name, new logo, and new website, but with the same dedication to supporting adults in helping raise a generation of media savvy youth!

November 12 to 17 is Bullying Awareness Week in Canada. To mark the week, MediaSmarts has joined Facebook, Family Channel, PREVNet, Concerned Children’s Advertisers, Kids Help Phone, Free The Children and STOPcyberbullying.org to launch the Be Bold: Stop Bullying campaign in Canada.

Despite what many adults believe privacy matters to youth. More and more, though, youth are finding that their actions online are monitored – by parents, teachers, and corporations. A high school principal creates a fake Facebook profile page and adds over 300 of her school’s students as friends; a Texas middle-school plans to introduce ID cards with microchips that its students will be required to carry at all times; an Indiana high school student is expelled after a profane tweet (sent in the middle of the night from the student’s home computer) alerts his school’s monitoring system.

Young people today spend large amounts of time sharing parts of their personal lives online playing games, “checking in” with geolocation apps, posting photos and catching up with friends through social media. But despite this openness, privacy does indeed matter to youth, especially with their online actions being increasingly monitored by parents, educators, and corporations.

As well as invaluable tools for keeping in touch with our friends, families and our work, mobile devices have become an increasingly big part of how we access the Internet. Unfortunately, while many smartphones are nearly as powerful as computers, we often don’t use the same caution with them as we do with our computers—and they often don’t have the privacy and security safeguards that come built into computers.