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"Growing up Online", a film directed and produced by Rachel Dretzin and John Maggio, touches on an extremely important to both American teens and their parents. Growing up Online illustrates stories of teachers, parents, and teenagers, and the effects of the internet, mainly online profiles, on their lives. This film, correctly in doing so, portrays virtually every American teen as having a MySpace, or a Facebook account. The film retells the story of a gothic teenager, Audrey, who at school has few friends, but on MySpace became immensely popular for her model pictures, unknown to her parents. Eventually a parent stumbled on to her profile, notified the school, and Audrey was forced by her parents to take down the profile. Audrey tremendously upset about this; she said she “felt as if part of her life was taken away”. Eventually Audrey’s parents came to understand this part of her life, diagnosing her profile as a creative expression, and even support what Audrey does with her profile. Another story told was through the eyes of teachers, who are forced to change their teaching styles for the students to stop cheating, and to more efficiently teach their students. Some teachers were upset about the use of “Spark Notes”, a website that summarizes books, other though, embraced this new technology, letting their students attain the general idea from the book, rather than reading the entire book and getting all the details. Growing up Online also brings attention to a huge problem in today’s society, online bullying. The film tells the viewer of a boy who was the victim of such intense online bullying that he hung himself. The boy was in middle school, and had been victimized by bullies on his instant messaging account, and at school, eventually it was too much for him to handle, finding a website that showed one how to take his own life, he hung himself in his bathroom. The film portrays internet as a very dangerous tool, especially with its online profiles, their seemed to be no separation between the student’s online lives, and their offline lives.

If I were to make a documentary about the internet’s impact n my own life, it would focus mainly on the convenience it has provided me with. The documentary would be positive, telling of how much more work I have accomplished because of the convenience the internet has added to my life; I can now research anything I want, whenever I want, before I would have to dig through books, a rarely used resource in today’s society. I would stray from the idea that internet takes over my life, I do not know a single person who spends all, let alone the majority, their time away from school online “socializing” with their “friends”, I believe that one should only use Facebook to plan to meet up with their friends, because, if you are really friends with a person, than why would you be typing to them instead of actually hanging out with them? Talking through Facebook is not real socializing; it is a temporary way to set up plans with your friends, if used otherwise, it is not being used correctly, and can blur the user’s sense between reality and fiction. In “Growing up Online” we what happens the users lines are blurred, a student kills himself because he could not separate his online life from his offline life, he should have stopped going online, and found some real friends that he could relate to. This is another big topic that my documentary would focus on, because it is such a big issue today, many kids have killed themselves because of online issues.