Relax

The reading that I liked a lot this week was the one about the fears about kids safety online being overblown. This is something that I have always agreed with. The article said that only three percent of kids had had someone attempt to communicate with them who was unwelcome, and only .08 percent of those kids had actually gone through with a meeting with these people. Yet fifty-two percent of the school administrators believed that kids sharing information online was a big problem. Clearly the schools are overreacting. I think that they are almost taking the kids for idiots. Even if the kids do end up putting personal information on whatever social networking site they choose to frequent, I’m sure that they’ll be smart enough to notice when someone is trying to take advantage of them or make unwanted conversation with them, and then they will ignore those people. This whole overreacting about what kids are doing ties in well with things like the Columbine school shootings and how because the shooters played a couple video games with guns in them, then any kid who plays any sort of game like that is going to become some sort of murderous psychopath. Just like the parents need to relax a bit and not worry that Grand Theft Auto will turn their Jimmy into a gun-toting criminal, the schools and others need to calm down and give the kids a little respect instead of assuming that every one of them is going to meet up with some pedophile for hanging out on Myspace.