Digital Smarts - A Tipping Point

Thomas Friedman suggests in his The New York Times article, Online and Scared, that we may have reached a tipping point in our online interactions. There is an urgent need to recognize that we are all, as Freidman puts it, “connected but no one’s in charge.” As we spend more time online shopping, dating, friendship sustaining, enemy making, learning, teaching and even collecting what we know about the world, Friedman points out that it is even more important for kids to have some grasp of digital civics. Both kids and adults need to come to the realization that the internet is an open sewer of untreated, unfiltered information, where everyone needs to bring skepticism and critical thinking to everything they read and basic civic decency to everything they write. It is a tall order, but he feels our very existence may depend on it.