YOUTH VOICES | “Hooked In” an Interview with Lisea Lark, 13
Lisea Lark, a 13-year-old in Columbia, SC, talked with bNetS@vvy about some of the ways she and her friends use technologies, why social networks and cell texts have won out over email, and what she does to keeps herself safer online.
You
mentioned that you and your
friends recently switched from MySpace to
Facebook. Why switch, and
how do you get everyone to do it
together?
MySpace just lets you have a
profile, but Facebook connects you to schools
around your area, so we’ve switched to be
connected more with other schools. You can
either message people or comment them. There
are lots of things you can do. You can draw
pictures for them or take quizzes and stuff to
see if you and your friends have the same likes
and dislikes.
How it works is, you join a network—your school or town—and then you can upload pictures and write your profile and share stuff. You can invite people to join. But you have to be careful. There’s not a sure way to know that people who message you are who they say they are.
I set my profile to private so that only my friends can see them.
How much
time do you spend on these
sites?
I use it more during the summer. During the school year, maybe 30 minutes a day. My mom gives me an hour limit during the week, and two hours on weekend. My dad doesn’t have a limit at his house, but he makes me finish my homework before I can get on the computer for fun.
Have you
met people in real life
that you met on a social networking
site?
You can never be 100 percent sure who you’re talking to online. I haven’t ever met someone from online, or been approached, but I have gotten to know some kids better before meeting them in person. Like my best friend … one of my friends knew her and said I should add her to my friends list. So I did and got to know her better. Now she’s one of my best friends.
In
general, how much do you worry
when you’re online or using your cell
phone?
I’m careful but I don’t worry too much, really. If someone requests to be my friend [on a social networking site] and I don’t know who they are, I’ll sometimes ask to see if they’re connected to someone I know or are friends of my friends. If I don’t know them, I always block them.
What
about when you accidentally go
to an inappropriate Web site? What do you
do?
It hasn’t happened to me, but it has happened to a lot of people at my school. They’re researching projects and weird pages come up. They tell the teacher or the librarian.
At school, they talk to us a lot about technology. We have a Technology Code of Conduct that we sign at the beginning of each year, where we promise to only use computers for educational purposes.
Do you
use the Internet a lot for
school?
We do. Pretty much every project or report does require a computer so the kids that don’t have computers are kind of out of luck.
I use Google a lot, but also my school district Web page because it has a list of sites that are good for different subjects and researching.
It’s hard to know if a site is reliable. I’ve learned the first thing to do is check the spelling. If there are errors, it’s probably not a good resource. And also don’t just get your information from one site, compare between a few and see if they say the same thing. At the bottom of the page, you can usually see when a site was last updated, and that’s good to check sometimes, too.
Do you
use email?
I’ve had my own e-mail since before first grade, but I don’t use it much anymore. I use it with family because they don’t have MySpace or Facebook, but my friends use MySpace and Facebook to communicate, or we text on our phones.
Can you
have cell phones at school?
We can—as long as our teachers don’t see them. We can’t have them out or anything. I keep mine on vibrate but most kids turn it off or put it on silent. We don’t really use it to talk to each other in school; it’s more for texting or calling our parents when someone forgets something.
Has
anyone ever had problems with
bullying texts, sometimes called “flames”?
Yeah, one bad
thing is you’re not
sure you’re actually sure who’s
"talking"
or if it’s really
that person. Some of my friends have gotten
into fights when someone
else has stolen the phone and texted something
weird. A lot of people
borrow other people’s cell phones or ask to
look at the phones, so
it happens often. I try not to let people use
my cell phone to avoid
that.
What
would you say to an 8-year-old
who’s just starting to use the Internet and
email for the first
time?
Be careful. Make sure you don’t talk to strangers, just like in real life. And remember that nothing is secret online. Any email you send someone can be forwarded and copied, and you might not want that. Don’t say anything you don’t want.
On the Internet, make your search as detailed as possible, because if you type in “American Girl doll” you’ll get a lot of things you probably wouldn’t want to. At that age, I’d say ask your parent to help you.
What
advice would you give parents?
I would say it depends on the age. With younger kids, there’s so much bad stuff on the Internet, parents should help them if they’re researching a project. But with older kids, I think parents sometimes overprotect their kids, and sometimes that’s good—but not always.
For example, sometimes the time limit is hard if I’m researching a project, but my Mom is lenient on that and lets me get on her AOL account if I need to finish something.
Are you
saying that because your Mom
is in the room, by any chance?
Um, she is.
Lisea Lark is a 13-year-old eighth grader who attends a public middle school in Columbia, SC.