Philip M. Rosenthal Speaking about Technology addiction 2

it has facebook it has twitter it has blogs all these things let's talk a little bit about what those things are facebook some of you may know what it is it may not it's important to understand what it is they call it a social networking site it is a way that people can communicate with other people there are approximately 400 million subscribers to facebook right now it's growing by about 100 000 people a day everybody in the world is signing what does it do i go to facebook i can create what's called a profile of myself and i can put my picture and there's a lot of pictures but i can put one picture from like who i am i can put my name and i can put all sorts of information about myself anything i want the children who are using facebook and adults will put their where they live their address their phone number their cell phone number what school they go to everything about themselves every favorite hobby they'll talk about every muscular in their lives and then once you have this profile you can search for other people by name by school by all kinds of different search criteria and you can build a network of all of these friends and as i go around the world speaking to our children i ask them how many friends do you have in your facebook account and i hear five hundred a thousand two thousand one boy raised this hand said five thousand it was proud of five thousand i said five thousand why not six thousand this is because five thousand is all i'll let you have he says but don't worry i have a second account with two thousand in that one and he would this was a 14 year old boy i travel all over the world i'm sure some of you do too i know people in australia and england and switzerland and in south africa and i know people all over the world i don't think i have a hundreds or maybe i don't have any friends but i don't think i have 100 friends that are really like that but our children don't understand that and they will take what they call a friend and their friend will say well you got to meet my friend and then that friend says you got to meet my friend and before you know it they've got huge amounts of strangers that they are calling friends and the children will tell you oh but i know everybody there they're all either cousins or some relatives friends from school or friends from camp i know everybody there it's not child it's just simply not but they know all those people and they expose themselves because anybody can search for anybody here is a point to make that understandable i was asked to speak in another town with a nice jewish community and in this particular community um before i was given the the to speak to the to the community at large i had to speak to a group of uh lavon hormone of that town and i knew that they were a bit skeptical about someone who looks like me coming in and talking to people who look more like you not that it's uh different in my opinion you know maybe but they wanted me to pass through their uh clearance which was fine no problem with that but i figured in order for me to really make my point that i had to find something that would really get their attention so i went online and i did some searches using typical jewish children's names and um and and that town so i put in uh devorah or whatever in that town and i came up with a few profiles and one of them i happen to open up and look at and this particular young girl put her name her address her cell phone what school she goes to she had a whole school schedule every class what time it was and then she had some places where she could write things she had a profile of every detail of every mashup of her life 19 pages long his profile her hair color her eye color every mushroom but then further into it she started to you can write whatever you want and she started to speak about her parents and about how much she disliked them and how terrible they were and how they treated her badly and she used such little pain that i always say she would a sailor would have been embarrassed and i couldn't believe it so what i did was i went and printed it out made a few copies and i blacked out anything that identified exactly who she was it's not my job to report her to anybody and i gave this out to these robotics to read through to say this is an example of what goes on here in this town this isn't across the ocean in england or in amsterdam or brazil or where this is right here in your town i gave them a couple of minutes to look through it and read it and understand what they were looking at and then i said to them rabbi one of you is holding your daughter's profile this can happen to anybody don't please don't fall into the trap of saying anybody is is susceptible the dying said that we live in a new world and and that in that new world we can go anywhere we want it you can it's not just going to manhattan you can go anywhere and on the internet you can really go anywhere because the internet is the same but without any sort of borders or barriers there's nothing holding us back from going wherever we want to go or wherever someone wants to go and and that's a that that's scary because anybody can do anything in any moment and we we expose ourselves to any and everything that can change us in one second you may have a concrete steel reinforced dome over your house that there's no way that bunker to your next door neighbor who maybe isn't as strict as you are and get a hold of everything or maybe they don't even go to a neighbor maybe they go to the library i have a boy that comes to me for counseling um he didn't go to the neighbor he didn't go to the library he found out that he could stop at the dry cleaner and pay him a dollar an hour the dry cleaner says go on the internet do whatever you want so he goes and sits there his father thinks that he's in yeshiva and he sits there and he gets himself in trouble and and he's not happy about it the most important thing i can tell you is though don't go home with the words that i'm saying tonight and tell your children this is what you have to do if you yourselves are not going to follow the same rule don't expect them to follow your rules if you're not going to follow your own names and if you think that well they're not going to know they're very smart they see what's going on they know what's going on and they're going to see through you if you're not being the same as what you tell them so