The span of opinions was set early on in Thursday's panel discussion: On the one side are two commercials for German media literacy training site klicksafe.de, represented here by Mike Cosse. Advertising company Ogilvy made these two films depicting the dangers of the internet to young people. On the other side of the spectrum was Tim Cole, who disagreed wholeheartedly with the idea of the internet as a lonely place that is only to be consumed as a controlled part time activity. He repeated his idea of the internet as a place that people can exist in quite happily and this does not question their real lives.
The general change of paradigm seems to be that traditional Youth Information generally a top-down process while at the same time children make up their own rules that are somewhat bottom-up if not right out peer-to-peer. While the Youth Information professionals on the panel suggest a new approach such as being mere moderators of the discussions that young people have, Tim Cole goes even further and suggests that adults are lucky if the kids decide to talk to them at all. The question to him is if the adults, despite being professionals, are able to keep up with the young people.
Wilhelm Teuber of the German Ministry for Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth pointed out that the young generation is no homogeneous target group and that especially the level of education of the individual must be considered. A member of the audience raised the question if the things today's children are doing online are fundamentally different from what former generations did. People love to communicate and have always done so, only today the internet is another place to do that. Children have always tried to peek into the adult world and find out themselves things they were not supposed to see, like nude magazines.
Another audience member explained that online worlds like World of Warcraft lets children experience direct feedback for their actions. By completing a task in the game, they are not only rewarded by the system but also gain praise from their online peers, something that they might lack in reality when their real life accomplishments are not taken notice of properly.
Teuber hopes that online fads like happy slapping (e.g. hitting people, filming the attack with a mobile phone camera and uploading it on the web) do not work as a means of gaining online reputation (the "currency of the future" according to Tim Cole). Kids should be wise enough to scold their peers for acting that way, so that their disapproval might influence them more then the disapproval of an adult.
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