[Air-L] PBS Frontline: 'Growing Up Online'

[Richard Forno]

FYI......    -rick

COMING TUESDAY: GROWING UP ONLINE
Airs June 8th, 9PM ET (check local listings)

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/kidsonline/

"If 21st-century parenthood isn't scary enough," wrote The New York Times about this week's FRONTLINE rebroadcast, "Growing Up Online uses real-life stories to ask an increasingly important question: What does it mean to be part of the first generation coming of age steeped in a virtual world seemingly outside parental control"

In Growing Up Online, producer Rachel Dretzintakes viewers inside the very public private worlds that kids are creating online, raising important questions about how the Internet is transforming childhood, family, and school.

"We almost have to be entertainers," a New Jersey social studies teacher tells FRONTLINE. "They consume so much media. We have to cut through that cloud of information around them, cut through that media, and capture their attention."

In this hour report Dretzin also offers a corrective to widespread fears about online predators, finding strong evidence to question its prevalence. And she examines the dangerous new threat of "cyberbullying," which helped precipitate the suicide of a young boy in upstate New York.

"You've got a generation faced with a society with fundamentally different properties, thanks to the Internet," says Danah Boyd, a fellow at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society. "It's a question of how we teach ourselves and our children to live in a society where these properties are fundamentally a way of life. This is public life today."

We hope you'll join us Tuesday night, and visit the web sites of Growing Up Online and Digital Nation-- this year's follow-up report from Dretzin and correspondent Douglas Rushkoff -- for more on how the Internet has transformed virtually every aspect of modern culture.

Ken Dornstein
Senior Editor