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Opinion
Sense & Clickability
3/29/2007
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Having been asked by Campus Technology a couple of months ago to think a lot about student risk-taking behavior, especially online, I've collected quite a set of interesting links. For example, a senior at Boston University started the magazine, Boink, which solicits real students to "portray" sexual behavior ("soft porn"). Its tagline is: "College sex by the people having it." Oh, BTW, don't visit that site if you're at work. It is what is known as "NSFW" (Not Safe for Work). At Harvard University, H BOMB publishes articles, fiction, poetry, and art about sex, sexuality, and related topics. Tagline: "Don't believe the hype; read it for the articles."So, college student-aged human beings do some pretty stupid and potentially unsafe things. There's nothing new about that observation. That's why wars are mostly fought by the young: Everyone else is smart enough to let young enthusiasts "portray" cannon fodder in places like Iraq and Vietnam. It bears noting, though, that neither of the magazines mentioned here have much of a substantial on line presence, which I hope indicates that the students portrayed are at least smart enough not to license their images for Internet display. (Although, like I said, you could get into trouble at work just from viewing the front page of Boink.) And, H BOMB appears to have only published a single issue, in 2005.
Age and responsibility
Although most college students would deny me the memory, I can close my eyes and recall what it felt like to be "lectured" by older people about ethical things. I also retain from those years a strong resistance to not considering an 18-year-old an adult, although I find myself more and more frequently referring to my work-study students as "kids," something I'm trying to get under control as it is not only potentially offensive to them but dangerous to me.
However, recent brain imaging research funded by the National Institutes of Health "suggests that the region of the brain that inhibits risky behavior is not fully formed until age 25, a finding with implications for a host of policies, including the nation's driving laws." That's a daunting finding, and might just become the motivator for not only more in loco parentis action by colleges and universities but for more (and better) early training about risky online behaviors.
In my research, the best piece of writing about actual online risk-taking prevention I have seen, and which I highly recommend, is an ECAR Research Bulletin titled "
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