Speaker Stresses Social Media Safety To Area Students, Parents

The golden rule of the 21st century is that digital activity is public and permanent.

Richard Guerry, executive director of IROC2.org, stressed that rule to students and parents during presentations throughout the area last week.

Guerry, who has been holding Montana tours during the last 13 years, held the talks in Wolf Point, Poplar, Culbertson, Froid, Richey and Plentywood last week. He makes about 200 presentations throughout the nation during a year.

If you missed the live presentation, schools can provide video links to you free of charge.

When introducing the speaker in Wolf Point, school superintendent Loverty Erickson noted there has been a 40 percent increase of students who spend more than 3 hours daily on screen time compared to 2007.

“The Course to Digital Consciousness” program covered the promise and pitfalls of using social media.

Guerry noted problems happen when people put something in the world of communication that they don’t want to be communicated. “When you play with fire, you’re going to get burn,” he said.

Just like society learned how to be careful with fire, they need to understand the dangers of social media.

Cyber cruelty can feature hate, shaming, racism and bullying. He provided examples of how messages can lead to murder and other violent crimes.

He said that gaming leads to young people communicating with people that they don’t know.

In order to decrease risks, conversations should be kept only to the game being played.

Young people need to be relied on to come to parents with a problem. One of the determinations whether your child is old enough to use social media is whether the child understands how to evaluate risk.

Guerry noted that people get in trouble by posting things that they don’t want others to see. The same problem existed 20 years ago when the myspace site was popular. “The only thing that changes is the name of the app,” he added.

He stressed that there’s no such thing as a privacy setting. “Social privacy is impossible,” Guerry said.

People should stop regarding their device as a phone. The powerful devices are windows to the world. “And windows work two ways,” he noted.

The speaker explained that when speed and convenience goes up with devices, the degree of privacy had to go down.

Guerry urges people to learn to harvest the power no matter which tool they use. “Technology connects you to everywhere in the world,” he said. Guerry asked young people to learn from any past mistakes and build years of positive information.