TED Talk - James Bridle - What's Wrong With the Internet Today

Opening Your Time Together
In your small group, please discuss the following:

• Share your names, where you live, and your children’s ages
• What will you and your family be doing in the summer months?  Any travel, kid’s camps, etc. – or will your schedule largely be the same?
• Our TED Talk today on “the nightmare videos of children’s Youtube” is bizarrely humorous, but also a thought-provoking reflection on the stimuli that our kids – and us! – get from the internet.  What are some of your kids’ favorite online/streaming/gaming options, and how do you navigate their usage of these things?  

Watching the TED Talk

• To watch James Bridle's talk, "What's Wrong With the Internet Today", click here.​

Discussing the TED Talk

• Although he spends most of the talk on Youtube, Bridle is clearly disturbed by both the automatizing and monetization of content that occurs on the internet, and he argues that it ultimately can feed our worst impulses.  At the same time, Youtube in theory allows everyone to be a content creator rather than having that power rest solely in the hands of a few networks.  Given that our lives – and our kids’ lives – will be inextricably linked with the digital world for the foreseeable future, what are we to do with this?
• How do we help our kids – and ourselves – critically engage with what we watch, particularly in a world of clickbait, fake news, and feedback loops?