Teenagers on the Internet
This article is called “Teenagers’ Internet Socializing Not a Bad Thing’ by Tamar Lewin. It was taken from the New York Times in November 2008. It talks about how teenagers are socializing online, which can be a good thing. The articles audience is mainly to the parents of teenagers, and their children, because its telling the parents not to be afraid if their children are ‘wasting time’ on the internet. The opinions expressed by the researchers in this article regarding Internet socializing, unlike what parents say, is that it is a good thing for teens. They say that “it may look like the kids are wasting a lot of time… but their participation is giving them the technological skills and literacy they need to succeed in the contemporary world”. They are saying that we teenagers are learning a lot of things from the Internet. Socializing being one of the important things that we do, will help us get through living in the world and meeting new people. The study also said that we are “geeking out” on the internet due to the search engines, and we are using these engines to search for a particular subject and learning more about it, making it a hobby of interest. There were a few limitations of the scope of the McArthur Foundation Study, for example, they only interviewed 800 young people, that might have been enough to represent a country or a nation, but that number will not be enough to represent an entire generation. Another limitation is that the students that they interviewed did not have their names published to the article because of school rules. This may make a person believe that the research that they have done is not reliable, or in some way fabricated as to fit the study, for example, they might have interviewed the people that match their opinion mostly as to give them positive results. So there were a few limitations to the study and that they did not put the names of the sources they used made me feel like the research is somewhat