FRONTLINE

http://www.pbs.org/frontline/

This Week: "Growing Up Online" (60 minutes),

Tuesday, Jan. 22 at 9pm on PBS (check local listings)

Live Discussion: Chat with producers Rachel Dretzin and John Maggio Jan. 23,
11am ET

This Tuesday's FRONTLINE comes with a warning for everyone who's never made a
"friend" on MySpace, chatted with someone online, or sent a text message from a
cell phone: You live in a very different world than the one in which a new
generation is growing up, and this widening digital divide is becoming much more
profound than anyone might have once imagined.

In "Growing Up Online," producers Rachel Dretzin and John Maggio take us inside
the private worlds that kids are making on the Web, often outside the view, and
comprehension, of the adults in their lives.

A teenage girl creates a new name and persona for herself and becomes an
Internet celebrity from the privacy of her own bedroom. A lunch room fight gets
broadcast nationally on YouTube. A ninth grader is relentlessly teased online
and, tragically, is pushed to suicide by a friend's instant messages, setting
his father on a journey through his son's hard drive to figure out what went
wrong.

These are some of the film's more extreme and dramatic stories, but perhaps more
provocative are some of the smaller moments: A high schooler matter-of-factly
reports that he never reads books ("If there were 27 hours in a day, I'd read
Hamlet," he says), and he's pretty sure that most of his fellow students don't
read either. A young woman privately confesses that she's slipped into an online
world of anorexics that she doesn't know how to escape. A boy logs onto a new
Web site that aspires to be MySpace for the kindergarten crowd.

Throughout the film, parents hover nervously around their children's computers,
teachers try hard not to wag their fingers at students who'd rather watch a
podcast than write an essay, and academics try to understand what may be the
greatest cultural shift in American history. But if you think the answers
predictable, be prepared for the surprise of a teacher who thinks cheating might
not be such a bad thing and a father who comes around to supporting the risque
photographs that his teenage daughter had been secretly posting on the Web.

We hope you'll tune in to see how it all plays out on Tuesday night, and then
join us online to watch it again, explore interviews with teachers and experts
on teens and new media, and join our discussion at:
http://pbs.org/frontline/kidsonline/ .

Senior Editor
Ken Dornstein

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+ Live Online Discussion on Washingtonpost.com ...

Producers Rachel Dretzin and John Maggio will be online this Wednesday, Jan. 23,
at 11am ET, to discuss "Growing Up Online."

For details, see:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/discussion/2008/01/17/DI2008011702141.html

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funding for FRONTLINE is provided by The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur
Foundation. Additional funding is provided by the Park Foundation.

FRONTLINE is a registered trademark of the WGBH Educational Foundation.

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