To view faculty and student reactions, see the video here.
The day has finally come. Twitter at JC is no more.
The question is, why now? Students have been posting vulgar things on Twitter about each other since the site was created. Tweets rife with foul language and personal attacks occur almost daily. One would have to be blind, or not have a Twitter account, to not have witnessed this firsthand within the past three years. However, it wasn’t until students began tweeting about teachers that it became blocked in school.
This seems peculiar. Why didn’t the administration address the problems of social networking sites like Twitter before? The guidance department has dealt with many cases of students attacking other students via social networking sites before. Dean of Students Thomas Vierheller said, “We’ve had several incidents over time.”
According to Guidance Counselor Carrie Siemsen, “[Other students] have mentioned that there were horrible things being said about kids on Twitter. My understanding was that it was happening usually at home during the night, but nobody was naïve enough to believe that it wasn’t happening at school. Kids were talking to each other all during the school day. That was common knowledge, I thought.”
Why weren’t the countless tweets of students harassing other students enough to set off the administration’s alarm? Granted, posting derogatory comments about anyone on the Internet is wrong. But students are much more emotionally vulnerable than teachers. Many are not as secure in their identity and judgment as adults are, making them more susceptible to these online attacks.
So how come when a teacher is harassed, the administration goes as far as blocking the site where the harassment took place, yet when a student is harassed, it is viewed an ordinary teenage problem? Why didn’t a discussion about Twitter happen sooner? Perhaps people have become desensitized to teens attacking other teens by witnessing it so often, much in the same way that people can become desensitized to violence through watching violent movies. But although these questions may never be fully answered, one thing is clear.
A discussion is certainly necessary now. Let this column be the first of many.
As with most sites, Twitter is neither intrinsically good nor evil. While some students may use the site to send out inflammatory comments, others use it for harmless fun. Multiple businesses use it to market their products. Some teachers even use Twitter in their classes as another way to educate students.
Twitter also played an integral part in organizing the world-wide protests that occurred throughout 2011. According to Time Magazine, Amira Ayman and Yara al-Sayes coordinated donations of medical supplies to Tahrir demonstrations via Twitter. This example is one of millions. Protesters in many countries tweeted about their oppression, resulting in a huge amount of awareness and support from people around the world that would have been impossible to gain without this social networking site.
Given the multitude of valuable uses for Twitter, one would think that JC would take on the task of teaching its students how to use it responsibly. Unfortunately, this task is impossible if the site is censored.
Jonathon Green wrote in his article Did You Say Offensive? that “the victim culture, every sufferer grasping for their own Holocaust, ensures that anyone who feels offended can call for moderation, for dilution, and in the end, as is all too often the case, for censorship. And censorship, that by-product of fear – stemming as it does not from some positive agenda, but from the desire to escape our own terrors and superstitions by imposing them on others – must surely be resisted.”
Green hits the nail on the head. I propose that Twitter was blocked not because it was a distraction during class time, but because the administration is fearful that any access to the site will result in more inappropriate tweets.
Claiming that Twitter was blocked to prevent students from becoming distracted does not provide a convincing reason, given the amount of usefulness Twitter has. It’s a shame to sacrifice this utility just because it is not always used for the right reasons.
Besides, students who want to become distracted will always find ways to become distracted. One would have to block every website to destroy the possibility of distractions, and that would render the entire laptop program pointless. On the other hand, students who want to pay attention will pay attention, regardless of how many distractions there are.
Finding a way to deal with this mess is a challenge. While it is understandable that teachers may feel uncomfortable or threatened by the tweets of certain students, suspensions would be of little help in correcting the root of the problem.
As an educational system, the consequences of any wrong deed should be focused on reformation. Suspension, or even expulsion, may appear just to some, but is certainly the antithesis of educational values by definition. These types of consequences teach little, if anything at all. How can they, with the student kicked out of the very education that they need to have any chance of reforming?
Rather than taking some sort of aggressive disciplinary action, the best way to resolve this problem and ensure that it is not repeated in the future is through proactive discussion.
The fact is that people say things online that they would never say to someone in person all the time, which is one of the nastier psychological effects of the Internet. The Internet is also absent of tone. Tweets that look cynical to some may seem deathly to others.
These things need to be realized now in high school so that students won’t make similar mistakes in their future careers. Making a single emotional but thoughtless public post can easily result in the destruction of a career.
Principal Madelyn Ball shares similar views, saying “the big chunk we’re missing here is education. We’ve got to do a better job of teaching digital citizenship. The World Wide Web means everybody gets to see it. Nothing is private.” Ball plans for JC to take part in Digital Learning Day on Feb. 1, which takes place across the country in an attempt to showcase proper uses of technology for an educational environment.
But while Digital Learning Day is a step in the right direction , it is difficult to put this information to practical use if the students can’t even access the very sites they are learning about. Twitter should stay unblocked so that students have greater access to the world of technology that grows ever more important with each passing day. If not, then fear has once again stifled human potential. Although I suppose that, like the harassment of students, would be seen as normal.
Scott Novak is an Opinion Editor for The Patriot and jcpatriot.com.