Cautionary Tales for the 21st Century
Two incidents recently took place in Westchester County, NY, schools, where I live, that are pretty universal cautionary tales. Both, naturally, involved students and their use of the Internet.
In the Ardsley School District, located in southern Westchester, a member of the Board of Education recently resigned after vaguely threatening and insulting UStream videos were apparently posted by her son for all the world to see. The postings, and the young man’s apparent history of less-than-stellar behavior, set off a firestorm in the suburb that could have used a referee or at least a public relations spokesperson.
Ardsley Middle School was evacuated in the midst of state testing after several students reported that a website had posted a message titled “the-plot-to-bomb-ardsley.” According to police, the same student responsible for the lovely posting allegedly made threats earlier about the school and a female classmate in a Ustream video.
The police chief called the web posting “innuendo,” but more than 120 parents showed up at a public meeting to protest the initial decision not to remove the student until all the claims had been investigated by police. That was enough to persuade school officials to place the 14-year-old “in an alternative setting” for the rest of the school year.
No charges were filed, and police said there was no overt threat to students’ safety. School officials have not said whether the boy will be allowed back into the school in September, but his mother, the school board member, resigned once the smoke had cleared in the community.
In tony Briarcliff Manor last week, the usual pomp and circumstance of high school commencement took a turn for the bizarre (shades of MTV’s “Jackass”) when a graduateliterally dropped his pants and mooned his fellow grads and onlookers, did a 180 on the stage and mooned the dignitaries assembled there, then accepted his diploma from a shocked high school principal.
The District later took the diploma back, issued a harshly worded statement to the press, then filed charges against the student — disorderly conduct and exposure of a person. And in 10 seconds flat, the video was airing on YouTube. As of this evening, it had been seen 5,700 times.
Both of these incidents emphasize the power — good or bad — of the Internet. Shortly after the Ardsley Middle School was evacuated, I went on Ustream and looked for the video that had allegedly been posted by the offender. It had obviously been taken down, but there was a somewhat disturbing video of the young man, obviously watching something on his computer as the videocamera was running. He was typing, responding, and vaguely laughing. He looked almost like he’d spent years there. He looked like he needed some fresh air and a friend other than his laptop.
The Briarcliff student, on the other hand, looked like a high schooler who’d spent years waiting to stick to the school for which he obviously felt little fondness.
There are no easy answers and there’s no playbook for these incidents. They’re just cautionary tales. All caught on videotape.
I’ll be Blogging from NSPRA…
Image via Wikipedia
If you’ll look at the top of my home page here, you’ll see the “Blogging from NSPRA” link. That’s where you’ll need to go if you’re even vaguely interested in what I’ll be posting from the National School Public Relations Association’s national conference in Washington, DC, from July 6-9. Go there to stay posted. I’ll be doing a lot of work from there, but believe me — I’m definitely going on the boat ride!
Not to be too self-promotional about this, but if you want to subscribe by email to my posts, just go to the Subscribe by Email button in the right-hand column.
If you attended my Web 2.0 workshop, now might be a good time to build that iGoogle page and get your first RSS feed!
Presenting without Web Access…
Image via Wikipedia
I just recently learned that I will be presenting a Gold Mine session at the National School Public Relations Association conference in Washington, D.C., titled “School PR and Social Media,” without web access in the meeting room. Yikes!
Apparently, NSPRA’s being asked to pay huge prices for use of the Internet at the hotel, particularly in its large meeting rooms. That’s not very nice — and we all thought the Internet was for everyone. In addition, because it’s a big hotel, the only way you can pick up wireless from a meeting room is by perhaps doing your entire presentation with your laptop by the window.
Oh well. This will be interesting — a presentation about using social media without Internet access. Screenshots, here we come!
Using RSS Feeds
I just wrote a how-to article for eHow about RSS feeds, which provide Web users with a simple w
ay of storing and finding their favorite websites and blogs. You no longer have to depend on your browser’s bookmarking tool, which gets clumsy and disorganized. What’s more, by using web-based RSS readers like iGoogle or Pageflakes, your favorite feeds (which are updated for you) can be read from any computer.
Take a look at my eHow article, which provides you with step-by-step instructions.
What is Social Media?
I found an interesting eBook, “What is Social Media,” that’s worth reading when you have time for 40 pages. The good news is that you can come here anytime you want to catch up on your summer reading. It’s a well-organized and easy-to-read guide to the basics — blogs, Youtube, Digg, Delicious, and more. Once you read it, you’ll understand all those crazy terms that have been leaving you behind in the dust!
Multitasking and Overloading
The Associated Press has unveiled a 71-page study that looks at how young people consume news these days, and its seems that they suffer from “news fatigue,” overloaded with facts and frequent information updates, but often have trouble finding more in-depth news.
The study, released today at the World Editors Forum in Sweden, also reported that young readers yearn for quality and in-depth reporting, but have difficulty immediately getting such content. The report also says that the process they use to get their news involves multitasking and reading e-mails.
In the report, the AP recommends that news outlets “develop easier ways for readers to discover in-depth content and to avoid repetitious updates of breaking news.” The purpose of the study was to obtain a deeper understanding of the news consumption of younger audiences.
The young people who participated in the study also said they’re unable to give their full attention to the news because they are often simultaneously engaged in other activities, such as reading e-mail. That seems to be a dramatic shift from previous studies, which showed that people sat down to watch the evening news or read the morning newspaper.
“Our observations and analysis identified that consumers’ news diets are out of balance due to the over-consumption of facts and headlines,” said Robbie Blinkoff, co-founder and head anthropologist at the Baltimore, Md.-based Context-Based Research Group, which conducted the study for the AP.
Young people were studied in six major metropolitan areas: Houston, Silicon Valley, Philadelphia and Kansas City in the United States; Brighton, Britain; and Hyderabad, India.
Image by heidi.vilppola via Flickr
