HCRHS Media Lit

"NEWARK - The fifth-graders of Yolanda Bromfield's digital-privacy class had just finished their lesson on ­online-offline balance when she asked them a tough question: How would they act when they left school and reentered a world of prying websites, addictive phones and online scams? Susan, a 10-year-old in pink sneakers who likes YouTube and the mobile game "Piano Tiles 2," quietly raised her hand. "I will make sure that I don't tell nobody my personal stuff," she said, "and be offline for at least two hours every night." Between their math and literacy classes, these elementary school kids were studying up on perhaps one of the most important and least understood school subjects in America - how to protect their privacy, save their brains and survive the big, bad Web. Classes such as these, though surprisingly rare, are spreading across the country amid hopes of preparing kids and parents for some of the core tensions of modern childhood: what limits to set around technologies whose long-term effects are unknown - and for whom young users are a prime audience.

""Initially, helicopter parenting appears to work," says Julie Lythcott-Haims, author of How to Raise an Adult. "As a kid, you're kept safe, you're given direction, and you might get a better grade because the parent is arguing with the teacher." But, ultimately, parents end up getting in the child's way. In the first episode of Home School, The Atlantic's new animated series on parenting, Lythcott-Haims explains how helicopter parenting strips children of agency and the ability to cultivate their own tools to navigate the world. "Our job as parents is-like it or not-to put ourselves out of a job," she says. This episode of Home School was produced by Elyse Kelly."

"A proliferation of free, entertaining online content often leads parents, kids, and tech companies to overlook-or worse, disregard-data-privacy laws."

"YouTube stars are being paid to sell academic cheating, a BBC investigation has found. More than 250 channels are promoting EduBirdie, based in Ukraine, which allows students to buy essays, rather than doing the work themselves. YouTube said it would help creators understand they cannot promote dishonest behaviour."

"Facebook is exquisitely designed to feed our addiction to hyper-partisan content. In this world, fringe players who are apt to be more strident end up at the top of our news feeds, burying the middle ground. Science correspondent Miles O'Brien reports on the ways junk news feeds into our own beliefs about politics, institutions and government."

"TORONTO - Jordan Peterson fills huge lecture halls and tells his audiences there's no shame in looking backward to a model of how the world should be arranged. Look back to the 1950s, he says - and back even further. He tells his audiences that they are smart. He is bringing them knowledge, yes, but it is knowledge that they already know and feel in their bones. He casts this as ancient wisdom, delivered through religious allegories and fairy tales which contain truth, he says, that modern society has forgotten. Most of his ideas stem from a gnawing anxiety around gender. "The masculine spirit is under assault," he told me. "It's obvious." In Mr. Peterson's world, order is masculine. Chaos is feminine. And if an overdose of femininity is our new poison, Mr. Peterson knows the cure. Hence his new book's subtitle: "An Antidote to Chaos.""

"The company is trying out a new way to stop trolls from ruining your mentions."

"A behind-the-scenes look at Facebook's fight against false news. Facebook's role in spreading misinformation has come under scrutiny. What has the company done about the problem, and how is the fight going? (11 minutes)"

"Even in an era of historic media fragmentation, Donald Trump dominates our attention universe to the point where he blocks out the sun. Is it any wonder that people don't have any idea what Democrats stand for?"

"Hannah Smith was a 14-year-old living in Lutterworth, England, when she began receiving hateful messages on the social-networking site Ask.fm. A few weeks later, she committed suicide. Convinced their daughter was a victim of cyberbullying, her family called for the question-and-answer site to be shut down. But when Ask.fm officials investigated what happened, they found that 98 percent of the messages sent to Hannah could be tracked back to her own IP address. Hannah had been anonymously posting the derogatory comments about herself-something known as digital self-harm."

"The owner of video game marketplace Steam said it has removed a game where players could simulate a school shooting, a premise that sparked outrage among the families of survivors and turned out to be the work of a previously restricted publisher.  Valve Corporation said it has pulled Active Shooter, which was scheduled to launch on its Steam platform June 6. Steam offers a developer program allowing smaller game designers to publish their video games - commonly played on PCs or Macs - on the platform. Active Shooter was described as a "dynamic SWAT simulator" where players can choose to work as the member of a SWAT team attempting to disarm the shooter, or the shooter themselves."

"After 19-year-old Nikolas Cruz was accused of gunning down 17 people at a Florida high school last week, comedian Michael Ian Black started a thread on Twitter that sparked a vitriolic debate about the role of gender in gun violence. It began with the tweet, "Deeper even than the gun problem is this: boys are broken."  Black's tweet has been liked nearly 65,000 times. In an interview with NPR on Sunday, he elaborated. "I think it means that there is something going on with American men that is giving them the permission and space to commit violence," he said. "And one of the main things we focus on correctly is guns and mental health, but I think deeper than that is a problem, a crisis in masculinity.""

"Any discussion of the mass shooting crisis must include the cultural rot of masculinity. The problem is not with men, but with a culture that allows boys to remain boys well into adulthood."

"Of all the mass shootings since 1982, only three have been committed by women. While women comprise about 50 percent of the victims of mass shootings, female mass killers are "so rare that it just hasn't been studied," according to James Garbarino, a psychologist at Loyola University Chicago. If basically all mass shooters were women, I can assure you we'd be talking about that. So let's start talking about the culture of toxic masculinity that makes men believe they should get a gun and shoot people with it. We live in a culture that worships men with guns. You can probably think of many off the top of your head-John Wayne, Indiana Jones or James Bond come immediately to mind. They're all men who get what they want. Women are all eager to have sex with them. They have the respect of their peers and their communities. Most of the men who commit mass shootings were not those widely admired men. They were men who felt they were owed something, and that the world was not providing what they were owed."

"If you want to cut down on gun violence, first target toxic masculinity."

"YouTube, Instagram and Snapchat are the most popular online platforms among teens. Fully 95% of teens have access to a smartphone, and 45% say they are online 'almost constantly'"

"No one picks up the phone anymore. Even many businesses do everything they can to avoid picking up the phone. Of the 50 or so calls I received in the last month, I might have picked up four or five times. The reflex of answering-built so deeply into people who grew up in 20th-century telephonic culture-is gone."

"Members of the LGBTQ community and their allies sound off from all 50 states."

"Security experts warn that many Wi-Fi baby monitors - and other devices in the Internet of things - are vulnerable to hacking. In 2015, the security analytics company Rapid7 published a case study of baby monitors that found a number of security vulnerabilities. The risk is not just to privacy and peace of mind: A hacker could use a baby monitor to gain access to a home's network to get information off computers, possibly for financial gain."