IN A previous article, stemming from a specific incident at a local senior secondary school, I wrote about the relationship between teen sexual behaviour and technology.  What I didn’t have space to deal with was a further exploration of how much technology impacts upon the lives of today’s young people, not just here, but the world over. I remember watching CNN last year and some stories about a young man named Tyler Clementi.  To sum it up, Clementi was a gay University student who was secretly videotaped by his roommate having sex with another man in his dorm room.  The video was broadcast live on the Internet, and as a result, Clementi faced the ridicule of his fellow students until he couldn’t take it anymore and he committed suicide by jumping off a bridge.  It’s interesting to note that the persons who recorded and broadcast the sex act were charged with invasion of privacy.
Which of course brings us to the key factor in this age of social networking, and camera phones and blogging, and ‘lightning-fast Internet access’ and Google Earth with its street view feature. 
First of all, let me confess that I don’t use the Internet much, other than to send e-mails and read up on stuff that I’m interested in, either just out of general interest or stuff that I find useful for my articles.  But I live with the awareness that the people around me are far more plugged into the Internet than I am.  If it’s not coming out of my office and occasionally catching one of my staff quickly trying to switch from their open FaceBook account, then it’s the social network often popping up in normal conversation in an almost matter-of- fact way — particularly in conversation with young people — as if I’m supposed to automatically know what some term or the other is.
To illustrate how things have changed, at least in my view, I can offer a recent example.  A young friend of mine informed me that she had recently broken up with her boyfriend.  Now, in the old days, school-aged boyfriend and girlfriend broke up, and you’re sad about it, but then you move on, with no real lasting memento or memory.  From what I understand of the recent breakup, however, and I can’t see this not being replicated time and time again with young people across the country, the source of the young woman’s sadness was that they both had pictures up on their Facebook profiles, and when the breakup occurred, the pictures came down, and so people started to talk about it on something called a ‘wall’, if I got the term correctly.  As the young woman explained to me, it was more seeing what those people had to say on her ex-boyfriends profile, and the fact that it remained there for everyone to read which hurt, than the actual breakup itself.
To me, with the rise of social networks and blogs et cetera, it’s as if the current younger generation, or I should say generations, have taken on these second lives, this virtual reality that is starting to become as real as the reality that all of us from a generation have always been accustomed to.  For them it appears that it is a reality that has almost  as much consequence as does the real reality, particularly because the two are so closely matched.  I know it is a fact, and this from largely second hand sources, that almost everything makes it on Facebook virtually the moment it happens.  Parties, hanging around in school, family outings, car crashes, dinner dates – before the event proper is finished it’s being posted online and being analyzed and dissected and talked about and further published.
Usually, I try to offer some sort of objective recommendation or solution in relation to the issues that I cover, or some idea towards taking a different perspective on them.  In this case, however, I have to admit that I am truly stumped.  To offer a solution would be to presuppose a problem, and the reality is – outside of the excesses, and these exist in every aspect of life – there is nothing really that can be scientifically or even anecdotally proven to be ‘bad’. 
And maybe, now that I come to think of it, that may be what my generation needs to realize about this new reality that our children and grandchildren seem to have taken upon themselves.  What we’re viewing is neither bad nor good but simply something different.  I know I have more than a few friends my age who have their own Facebook accounts but when you ask them about it, they all confess to either minimal activity or none altogether since it’s usually their son or daughter who set up the account in the first place.  
Who knows?  Maybe someday I’m going to give it a try to see what all the fuss is about, create an account and check up on what my staff are saying about more, or the parties my kids are attending.  Or maybe I might be better off just sticking to e-mails and online articles.