Philip M. Rosenthal Speaking about Technology addiction 3

a short little message on your phone, 140 characters. Um, you know, um, I'm on the BQE. I'll be home in 20 minutes. That's a typical kind of a message. Twitter is the same thing, but you can follow somebody. They can you can, for instance, uh, on Fox News or CNN or one of those kinds of places, they send out all kinds of messages all the time. uh they're like news updates and it's just a very small oneline message about whatever. So you can subscribe to this and every time they type something you get that message. But you can do the same thing. You can post your own messages and our children love to do this Twitter. They send messages to each other and back and forth and they read each other's messages and they sign up for all kinds of craziness. The problem is is that again there's no there's no uh there's no filter to say what is and what isn't good. So anybody and it's free so anybody can sign up to receive they're like channels I guess to you can sign up for a million different subjects of these Twitter messages and they come from every one of these telephones and the and the and the iPod they all have this technology. So, um, to be careful about that blogging, everybody's talking about blogging. What's blogging? Well, let's take the mystery out of of all of the internet and the technology in this uh, it sounds so strange, keep it simple. Uh, basically, as I've been standing here for the past few minutes speaking, I've been blogging. I've been telling you my opinion and my idea and my understanding uh based on my historical uh information and you've been listening to it. If I were then to say um if anyone would like to answer back to me about what I've just said, you can. And someone raises their hand and says, "Well, I disagree with you or I agree with you or you know, I'm not interested in you." That's called blogging. And you can go online to these millions of blogging sites and you can type anything you want and anyone can answer it or respond to it all they want. And I can tell you that that I deal with on a daily basis the the the most vile lush and horror through some of these blog sites that people go on to that are about our community. And and it's it's a shame because because some people are very shortsighted. they think, "Oh, well, I'm mad at uh at that person or at that group or at that subject or whatever it is." And they push all this stuff out there onto the internet, thinking, "Well, the only people who are going to read it are people, you know, from our uh uh community." But that's not the truth. There are millions of people out there who love to read all about our dirty laundry. And it it it's terrible. The you know the the New York Times and all these things, you think they don't sit and read these blogs that go on within the Jewish community, you're making a very big mistake. And I really don't like the blogs. I think they're very dangerous. I think that they that they create uh a false sense of of being anonymous and it makes us feel like we can go out there and say and do anything we want and and that's not right. It's it's quite wrong. Um so so those are those are the big three the Facebook and the Twitter. why there's thousands and thousands of other websites and things like that that that go on. But some people um will fool themselves into thinking, well, yeah, we've got the computer and we've got the internet and we've got it under control and my kids never go on it. Um, I'm going to get into some of those suggestions of how we can protect it in a little bit. But as I came in, um, one of the women came over to me and said, um, I I heard you speak once before. My husband and I took your advice and we put the software that you suggested on the computer and it happened to be that one night we went out and we forgot to turn off the computer in the office. And while we were out, we got a message because it's set up to do that, an email saying, "Someone's using the computer right now." And it literally saved somebody. I can tell you story after story after story about how this software that I will recommend to you has saved literally saved lives. So it's it's very critical. But this I have to say this tip. If you have a computer in your house, whether it has internet on it or not, it should not be in a private place. I my heart starts to hurt when I when I think about how many cases I have right now where there are marriages that are just torn apart because someone in the family is going into a private room and closing the door and using the computer for terrible things. If you think that you've got a computer that is just an old machine, it doesn't have internet. It doesn't connect. It doesn't do anything. And therefore, I gave it to my child. Yeah, they play uh you know uh solitire on it. There's nothing they can do to get in trouble. This looks like a like a thumb drive, you know, like it has memory on it, like you kind of you stick it to the machine to save files on, but it's not. It's basically it's a cell phone. You take a SIM card and you you you put in the SIM card and it's a telephone without the the the keypad and the speaker and the microphone and it gives internet access. So they can go and buy one in the store, $30, $40 maybe. You pay as you go. So as you use up the time, you can add to it. You plug it into the computer and it's the same internet that that the cell phone has on it when you get from Verizon or AT&T or whoever. They go on this computer that you think is totally safe and they go anywhere they go on the internet and then when they're finished they take it out and they put it away. You don't know the difference. You you think that's all they do is play solitary on this computer. So you've got to get that computer out of that room. A computer should be in the kitchen. It should be in the in the family room. It should be in a place where you can see what is going on. And they shouldn't be using it if if a parent is not right there and then. You know, kids have a bit of an everything. They can go anywhere into any little crevice and we have to uh we have to be careful of that and watch over what they're doing. One of the things to be careful of, whether it's the computer or the or the phone, is that um they're they'll stay up all night long if they can get access to this technology playing with it. And ask the teachers. The teachers say the children are falling asleep in the middle of the class. It's not because the teachers are boring. It's because the kids were up all night. A child will take a cell phone and stay up until 3 and 4:00 in the morning texting their friends. And And if you don't believe me, don't believe me. Test me on this. If your child has a cell phone, get a copy of the detail bill from Verizon or whoever your provider is. You can get it. You can have them print it out. It will show you every text message. It won't show you what they wrote, but it'll tell you the time and the date and the phone number that the text came from. And look at the times. If you allow them to take this in their bedroom, they will stay up all night texting. We've done studies, national studies. The children will come out of school to get on the school bus to go home. They'll text message the kid sitting right next to him on the bus. Instead of talking, we're losing our ability to communicate.