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This week in class we talked about socialization. We also watched a movie made by Frontline about "growing up online." This movie pointed out many true and false points about teenagers and internet activity. While it is true that teenagers are addicted to the internet (mainly facebook and other such sites), we are not telling the whole world exactly where we live. We're not stupid like the video made it seem at first.

To prove my point that teens are addicted to facebook, I tried to keep myself off of my facebook until I finished this blog post. Sadly I caved shortly after starting. As I am writing this, I only make it a couple sentences before I check to see if anything has changed at all. My efforts are useless because there's no way something could have changed in the 30 seconds I wasn't looking. I incessantly press the home button to refresh my news feed. Nothing. Not even a new status.

The internet is where many kids feel most comfortable. The movie spoke about many kids who said they were 100% themselves online. They weren't comfortable being completely themselves in real life around their peers. They feel that they won't be judged at all when they're online. The internet is so "easy." The parents in the video were overly concerned in my opinion. Speaking from experience, I know what I should and should not share online. I know that if someone I don't know asks me personal information I should not tell them. These "rules" have been drilled into my head ever since elementary school when we first started using computers.

This week's honors article was all about self. More specifically, the looking-glass self and mirror self-recognition. The article states that, "In his Tree of Knowledge System, Henriques states that the human ego or 'self' has evolved because human beings are the only animals that have had to justify their behavior to others." One theory is the mirror self-recognition paradigm. This paradigm says that "animals are given the opportunity to see their reflection in a mirror. If the animal shows signs of recognizing the image in the mirror as its own, this ability suggests that the animal possesses a rudimentary ability to take itself as the object of its own cognition." Showing this ability does not necessarily mean that the species has reached the human level of self-awareness, and not showing that ability does not mean that the animal lacks the ability of self-awareness.