Posted on 08/02/2009 9:40:28 AM PDT by marthemaria
Websites such as Facebook and MySpace encourage teenagers to view friendship as a "commodity" and are leading them to suicide, the head of the Catholic Church in England and Wales has warned.
Archbishop Vincent Nichols said the sites are leading teenagers to build "transient relationships" which leave them unable to cope when their social networks collapse. He said the internet and mobile phones were "dehumanising" community life. His comments follow the death of 15-year-old schoolgirl who took a fatal overdose of painkillers last week after being bullied on Bebo, another networking site.
In an interview with The Sunday Telegraph, the Archbishop of Westminster also voiced his concerns about the loss of loyalty and the rise of individualism in British society which he said threatened to undermine communities. He picked out footballers for acting like "mercenaries" and expressed his fears over moves to relax laws on assisted suicide. He said that relationships are already being weakened by the decline in face-to-face meetings and conversations over the phone.
"I think there's a worry that an excessive use or an almost exclusive use of text and emails means that as a society we're losing some of the ability to build interpersonal communication that's necessary for living together and building a community. "We're losing social skills, the human interaction skills, how to read a person's mood, to read their body language, how to be patient until the moment is right to make or press a point.
"Too much exclusive use of electronic information dehumanises what is a very, very important part of community life and living together." The archbishop blamed social network sites for leaving children with impoverished friendships. ." .
(Excerpt) Read more at telegraph.co.uk ...
My Space perhaps...Facebook NEVER!!! Sorry but I love Facebook.
What about texting? During a family get-together one teen kept texting her friends. When the grandfather took the phone away she started crying. Think about it....
Yep, and guns kill people/sarc
Factor in that these kids that rely on Facebook and Myspace for relationships are likely to have a poor relationship with their parents. They probably grew up with the television as an electronic nanny and fast food was their chef.
"Everything in moderation", he posted on the Internet forum.
Well I think it is up to the parents to put restrictions on the phone texting...not the grandparents for sure. Who gave him the right to discipline? If it was the parents fine, but to do it just to do it would not go over well in my house.
We all know it’s really that confounded noise that these young people call ‘Rock and Roll’....
Although, all kidding aside; what passes for Rock today is seriously degenerated from what it was in the 70-90’s. Who needs a drummer when a drum machine is there? Who needs harmony, counter-melody and non-sexual lyrics? We have a culture of one-hit-wonders; who’s music may be mediocure at best - but they have a video with really hot semi-naked girls. Gone are the genius’s of Rock (Beatles, Chicago, Boston, Fleetwood Mac, Styx, and the others).
Now we have ‘Rap’ - c’mon; that’s just Square Dancing lingo with foul language.
It was HIS house. That, and she was warned by both her Mom and the grandparents. She had a habit that they knew of before the birthday celebration.
Regardless of the enforcement authority, which is your focus, I find it sad that a family event is of little concern to the children. It pertains to the subject matter of this thread.
It's a delicate thing. If the parents condone rude behavior and the gathering is occurring in their home, then Grandpa overstepped his boundaries. If the parents are indifferent and it was at Grandpa's home, then he has the right to set rules.
It really depends on the relationship. If the Grandparents are generally domineering, then it's one more instance of their sticking their noses in. If the relationship is generally respectful, then they were just being helpful and supportive.
Having been on the other side of the fence, we are careful not to assume authority which is not ours, but we are not just strangers in the relationship either.
A favorite from grammar school:
Swing your partner
Round and round
Throw her in the toilet
And flush her down.
If the kids aren’t friends in real life, I can see where this would be the case. However, making a sweeping claim such as this is absurd. I’m on Facebook. Before I signed up, I thought it was not a good thing ~ that people were putting out too much sensitive information about themselves to random strangers.
Now that I have signed up, I see that in some cases yes, that is what people are doing. HOWEVER, they don’t have to. You are in charge of what you put out there for all to see, or not see. Each user is responsible for their own security.
That said, I signed up and went about adding friends. I found friends I hadn’t seen in 20-30 years. I also found friends I see almost daily. It is a good way to keep up with my friends and communicate with them without having to go look up their phone number or address (especially if I haven’t seen them in awhile or if they or I have moved).
Naysayers could have said the same thing about email or even the telephone when it was first invented.
Why are these children allowed to even go on these websites or surf the net unsupervised in the first place? And why aren’t these kids taught to have thicker skins? This is all the fault of parents dropping the ball in a major way because they are scare poopless of actually telling their kids NO.
Indeed, and Judge Bork was ridiculed for pointing this out in his book, "Slouching Towards Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline."
Bork contends that the invention of the transistor radio allowed young people to develop a subculture separate from that of adult society.
I believe that the development of this subculture, along with widespread drug use, permanently altered the nature of society. In past generations, the impulsive, self-absorbed stupidity of adolescent twerps was kept in check throught societal sanity until the point at which the little punks"grew up" (When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.). We now have entire generations who have never grown up.
Electronics has enabled the creation of self-affirming subcultures of stupidity.
I think the UK has a lock on the number of idiots per capita.
Frank Sinatra was a big part of creating a distinct youth culture. In the 1940s, his unprecendented and exclusive appeal to adolescent girls set the stage for Elvis and then the 1960s youth movement.
But in the 40's the whole family would listen to Sinatra on the radio. If the radio played something the old folks didn't like, they could turn the dial. Once a kid could take the radio with him, the media could focus on kids exclusively. They could peel the kids away from the herd.
But with Ipods now we’ve gotten away from that isolation. /sarc
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