Let's Take a Walk... Outside and Together

A couple months ago, I was riding in the car with a young woman I have known for years. She was a 10th grade student in the first period on my first day of my first year of teaching. She is now a senior in college, and doing big things. As cliché as it sounds, I have no doubt learned more from my former student than I have taught her.

This particular day, she was telling me about her new boyfriend, and how other girls were trying to flirt with him. Though clearly not a 21st century issue, she spoke about it in unmistakably 21st century ways.

“I’m saying though. First, she had friend-ed him on MySpace two weeks ago. Then she be leavin comments on his page about three, four times a day. Last week, she Facebook-ed him and then she had the nerve to tag him in some of her photos. All I’m saying is that she better back up, because I will go in his account and block her. And I don’t know why he don’t set his account to private, anyway. He just let anyone friend him, then don’t even require approval on folks’ comments. This is crazy.”

Wow. I tried to be in the conversation, I really did. I followed up with, “Word? What’d she say in the comments? Where were they in the photo? How is ol’ boy handling the situation?” But in my mind, I was thinking, “So ‘friend’ and ‘facebook’ are now verbs, and ‘tagging’ someone in a photo on your page might mean sending a ripple of reactions when that same photo shows up on their page.” I was fascinated by her computer-assisted social network fluency, and was stuck on the technical pieces of how all of this was unfolding for my former student, her boyfriend, and the young ladies tryin to get at him.

It’s phat, no doubt. I chat with my cousins in England regularly, and I found a friend on MySpace that I hadn’t talked with since the sixth grade. I check out several of my folks’ new singles on their MySpace Music pages, and I even set up a Catbook application for Ci-Ci on Facebook. Last week, Ci-Ci was Facebook-ed by Lola, one of my friend’s cats. Ummm, no comment please. I recognize I might be in too deep.

But for real though. What are we really into? In South Korea, they started a boot camp to cure “web obsession.” This is a country that boasts that 90% of homes are wired, and the “PC Bang” Internet cafés are the hub of social life for young folks. They are now taking the lead on addressing what is increasingly emerging as a serious problem (in Korea and the United States): Internet addiction. They set up this boot camp with typical military-style reform flair, where a large set of Korean teenage boys go to get “cured.”

Korean Boot Camp Aims to Cure Web Addiction (from NYT, Sunday, November 18th, 2007)

During their time at the boot camp, the boys are denied Internet access, and (re)introduced to outdoor activities, that involve human interaction and teamwork. Sounds nice, right?

Many of us in our late twenties just missed the friendster-myspace-facebook craze during our school years, which seemed to have resulted in some initial mistrust of the setup. And for myself and many of my friends, we resisted for a while, but curiosity caved in and we too set up pages on all the different networks. It turns out it’s madd fun, actually. There are things that we learn about one another that somehow we didn’t know before; there are styles, comments, and songs we use to design our sites that let others know a bit more about ourselves too.

Like most everything, I suppose the key to sanity is finding a balance. So we can do our shopping and bill paying and newspaper reading and chatting and dating and movie watching and music listening and card playing and museum touring and class taking on-line. But in so doing, we miss out on the beautiful encounters that we have from being out in the world.

And I have a few more points I want to make, but instead I’m gonna head outside. I think I’ll walk up the street, through the community center, and to the library. Inside, I’ll check out a real book (that I can hold) from a live person (with whom I will talk). I'll stop by my neighbor's house and ask if he wants to grab a slice of pizza with me around the corner. If he's not on the computer perhaps he'll come...

Incidentally, when I mentioned my amazement/concern/excitement with my former student during the conversation about her new boyfriend a couple months back, she answered with the clear truth “OMG, Ms. Ford… UR SO OLD-SKOOL!”