The Wall Street Journal-20080118-WEEKEND JOURNAL- Review - Television- Lives on the Line
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WEEKEND JOURNAL; Review / Television: Lives on the Line
When it comes to revealing what kids get up to on the Internet, there are no great surprises in "Growing Up Online" (9-10 p.m. ET Tuesday on PBS's "Frontline," but check local listings). It's disturbing nonetheless to hear kids describe their lives online, and to see in cumulative detail how completely they have been sucked in to a world of exposure that bends young minds in ways unimaginable to earlier generations. What's even more disturbing is the message here for baffled and worried parents, which appears to be: Don't fight it. Capitulate.
Not in every case, of course. Part of the show was filmed in a classroom where teachers are giving children the equivalent of a "Just Say No" lecture -- only on the subject of Internet predators. Here, the mantra is Stop, Block and Tell.
And then there is the harm kids do to each other. The saddest story comes from the parents of Ryan Halligan, a seventh-grader who was bullied at school and taunted on the Internet, too. As his father learned after Ryan's suicide, cruel instant messages were only the beginning: His despondent son eventually found Web sites where he could talk to other depressed kids and get tips on how to commit suicide. Mr. Halligan eventually tracked down another boy who had been sharing similar thoughts with Ryan, and contacted the boy's parents to warn them. No response.
Parental inaction is the most troubling theme of "Growing Up Online." When we first meet the father of Jessica Hunter, he explains how upset he was to find out that his daughter had created a whole new persona for herself on the Web. In cyberspace, Jessica -- who says that she felt like a misfit in ordinary life -- became famous as the mysterious Autumn Edows, striking provocative poses in ripped fishnet stockings. When the Hunters found out about this, they went into normal, protective parental mode, and made her take down her Web site. But she rebuilt it, and Dad no longer complains that his girl spends her virtual life done up as a Goth prostitute and titillating strangers. "She found a world she could live in," he says. She found "a way to create or reach out."
Raising children has never been easy, and none of the experts here claim that the Internet is as benign a venue as the malt shops where kids used to congregate to share their secrets. Yet the English teacher who still insists that her kids actually read books and who would rather engage them in a traditional classroom than use interactive blackboards, is a lone wolf. A few parents say that they have taken steps to monitor their children's Internet use. But none seem able, or even willing, to decisively yank their young back from the virtual world into the real one.
They shouldn't even try, many of the experts tell us. Living online is the way it is now, and we had better adjust to that. So says the high-school teacher, who is well aware that many of his students use Web summaries to avoid reading books, or who engage in what amounts to cyber plagiarism: Instead of fighting that, he posits, "Why not accept it as a reality and say that's how the outside world works? If I can find someone who is working in advertising and who knows how to push a product and they can select information from other sources and borrow and steal and put it together and shape it, isn't that a skill I want them to have?"
If nothing else, a comment like that is instructive because it proves that the Internet is not the only place a child can encounter warped perspectives.
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Much more uplifting is a nearly four-month marathon under way on PBS's Masterpiece Theatre. "The Complete Jane Austen" (current segments are on Sundays from 9-10:30 p.m., but check local listings) began last week with a new production of "Persuasion" and continues this week with "Northanger Abbey." This story, thought to be Ms. Austen's first completed book, was not published until late 1817, after her death.
"Northanger Abbey" has all the desired elements of an Austen tale, including an eligible young woman with a good suitor and another who turns out to be a bad egg. Yet the there are some twists. For one, Catherine Morland (Felicity Jones) is a bit more naive than the typical Austen heroine. Also, her courtship by the tender and witty Henry Tilney (JJ Feild) is complicated less by social prejudice than it is by Catherine's fervid imagination, stoked by her heavy consumption of Gothic romances.
This is Ms. Austen at her most airy, and a chance to become reacquainted with a tale not filmed nearly as often as some that will follow, including "Mansfield Park" and "Sense and Sensibility."
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'Life After People" (9-11 p.m. Monday on the History Channel) imagines what would happen to our houses, cities and the planet in general if all human beings were to be vaporized instantly, leaving everything else exactly as it is today -- TVs on, refrigerators humming, and happy pets waiting for dinner. The improbability of that premise is a relief, because what computers show us and scientists tell us is pretty grim. Start with "a massive die-off of dogs," after they had eaten and drunk what they could in our houses. Even among the lucky ones who managed to get outside, we're told, "there probably would not be a niche for smaller dogs."
As soon as power plants began to run out of fuel -- a matter of days or even hours -- lights would start going out all over the world. An exception might be a few spots like Las Vegas, where Hoover Dam's turbines could keep churning for years. Within six months, however, predators, including wolves and bears, would be roaming streets where weeds were already sprouting. Lightning wildfires would rage everywhere.
And so "Life After People" goes, offering snapshots of the world in 25, 50, 150 years, etc., as all signs of human civilization are swallowed up until, a thousand years hence, there might be no discernible sign that we were ever here.
One of the experts on this show seems to positively relish this prospect. He rhapsodizes about how beautiful everything would be without us, while the narrator croons that the creatures of the ocean would "welcome the disappearance of mankind." Why rats and squid and trees are more lovely and deserving than humans nobody explains, but they don't have to, do they? The only odd thing is why the collective vision here of a paradise without nasty, destructive Homo sapiens rewinds no further than a world of meadows where the deer and the antelope roam. Why not wish it all back to microbes in a lovely primordial soup?
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I have not seen a full episode of Fox's new game show, "The Moment of Truth" (9-10 p.m. Wednesday). Yet the DVD of various episode snippets the network sent out to reviewers was disappointing. Simply put, everything awful about it has already been seen. In this case, people sit in a red chair and answer a series of increasingly personal and embarrassing questions (based on revelations they have already been polygraphed about by the producers) all in pursuit of $500,000. Do you think your boyfriend is gay? Have you ever spied on a naked neighbor? Do you respect your father? Do you give nothing to charity?
In short, "The Moment of Truth" is a sort of Jerry Springer for the middle class. That is its only variation on a theme already at the center of nearly every reality show: How little some people value their privacy, how little dignity they have and how cheaply they sell it.
