Thinking Allowed.

In her high school track and field career, [Allison] Stokke had won a 2004 California state pole vaulting title, broken five national records and earned a scholarship to the University of California, yet only track devotees had noticed. Then, in early May, she received e-mails from friends who warned that a year-old picture of Stokke idly adjusting her hair at a track meet in New York had been plastered across the Internet. She had more than 1,000 new messages on her MySpace page. A three-minute video of Stokke standing against a wall and analyzing her performance at another meet had been posted on YouTube and viewed 150,000 times.

This is a quote from a Washington Post article on how a high school senior girl’s privacy and life has been turned upside down by the internet. A photo of her (that she didn’t even post) circulated and created “celebrity” status for her when she didn’t want it and didn’t ask for it.

We live in an age where celebrity life is scrutinized by paparazzi and Web 2.0 tools have allowed non-celebrities to actively seek their 15 minutes of fame through blogging, social networking, and YouTube.

But Allison Stokke didn’t actively seek anything. She is now living her own life, suffering the invasions of privacy, accepted by movie and rock stars, without any of the “perks” of that stardom.

Stokke has decided that control is essentially beyond her grasp. Instead, she said, she has learned a distressing lesson in the unruly momentum of the Internet. A fan on a Cal football message board posted a picture of the attractive, athletic pole vaulter. A popular sports blogger in New York found the picture and posted it on his site. Dozens of other bloggers picked up the same image and spread it. Within days, hundreds of thousands of Internet users had searched for Stokke’s picture and leered.

Creepy.

Now her father has to come home from work and scan message boards for potential stalkers!

Why am I blogging about this?

Because, to me, this emphasizes the overwhelming obligation educators have to teach responsible use of the internet.

We need to teach being safe alongside acting responsibly.

We already teach kids to drive safely.

We have health classes that teach students about eating healthy, sex, and drugs.

We teach them to be safe.

And we teach them to act responsibly for the safety of others.

Now we find our students living in a world where their own safety and the safety of others is global in the blink of an eye.

So how can we not teach them the same things as they apply to the Internet?

Image by Marshall Astor, found at Flikr Creative Commons

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 30th, 2007 at 10:28 pm and is filed under Cybersafety, Web 2.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.