Social Media, Juveniles, and a 'Dragon-Scenario'

 Around 2014, I had a daily German class....which required me to venture to my local town (Wiesbaden) each morning.  To get there, I rode the 7:15 AM bus out of my village.

This meant that I spent roughly twenty minutes on a bus with six adults and forty juveniles.  

So early on, I noted this trend.  'Huns' would be seated there and texting away to 'Martin'.  One had avoided the math homework....the other the science homework.  'Huns' opened up his work-booklet for math and photographed the page to be sent by WhatsApp.  'Martin' did his science page and sent it to 'Huns'.  A minute later, 'Huns' was filling in the blanks on his homework and was done by the time we arrived in the mid-city area.  'Martin' for all I know....was probably six to eight km away, or maybe over in the Frankfurt region.  

Was this screwing up the learning process?  Probably.  But how exactly would you halt this?

A month later, I stood waiting at the bus stop in town....waiting on a bus to return home.  Here stood two teenage girls (probably 13 years old), with one fairly distraught and weeping away. 

From what I could get out of this conversation....some boy had texted this weepy-girl a 'we are finished' comment.  No face to face meeting....just a text message.  The second girl was at least trying to console the weepy girl, but this wasn't achieving much.  Before WhatsApp came along, this would have all been a face-to-face thing, and maybe settled things in a more appropriate manner.

Since that fall, I've kinda observed a fair number of problems with social media, juveniles and the path of uncertainty....what I would call a 'dragon-scenario'.  

The 'dragon-scenario' is where people chat about things which aren't certain or 100-percent factual.  They worry about the unknown.  

Between pro-suicide chat rooms, cyber-bully situations, and teens walking into adult-situations without the tools to grasp things....the internet has delivered a serious problem for society.

I would almost go and suggest somewhere around age twelve....there needs to be this class called 'growing-up' where you lay out maturity topics that you normally wouldn't confront until you were 17 to 20 years old.  

Somewhere along this path....teaching kids to be skeptical, giving them the tools to recognize fake news, and arming them against cyber-bullying....is going to be messy.  In some ways, we are taking juveniles off the kid-track, and making them young adults...way ahead of time.  But there is no alternate path for this situation.