The Internet: It’s Like Never Leaving Junior High
(CNN) — Remember when you were 12 years old and you’d pass notes in class, making snide remarks about members of the opposite sex?
Remember the electricity that shot through school when word went around that there was going to be a schoolyard rumble?
Remember the rollercoasters of emotions, the whispers of gossip, the crying because your best friend betrayed you, the molehills made into mountains?
Janet Sternberg, a communications professor at Fordham University in New York who’s written a great deal about online civility, sees a reverse of a pattern created by television. If, as cultural critic Neil Postman asserted, TV ended childhood — the medium provided an impetus for young people to act older, which created hand-wringing about generations growing up too quickly — the Internet has done the opposite, she says.