The Power of Positivity

Last year on Blackstone Valley Prep’s Facebook page, we shared five helpful questions for social media consumers to consider before posting or sharing content online. Why? Because more people are using social media than ever before! According to a recent study by Nielsen, a leading global information & measurement company, American adults spend more than 11 hours per day watching, reading, listening to or simply interacting with media — up from nine hours, 32 minutes just four years ago.

That’s a lot of posting, sharing, tweeting, and snapping!

 

Bar graph showing the breakdown of time spent online

With numbers on the continual climb (and not slowing down anytime soon), we thought it would be helpful to reshare those five important questions in the hope they serve as a great reminder about the power of positivity.

Dr. Cara Berg Powers, Executive Director of the Transformative Culture Project, further explains, “we can all probably think of a time when we’ve said something to someone online without considering that another human being was reading those words, targeted at them. That’s why it’s important for us to acknowledge that communicating online can be confusing for young people.

Middle and high school is not just where they learn about the world, it’s where they learn about themselves and one another. So how can educators [and parents] teach young people about civic dialogue in an online world — a world that is hard to monitor — so they can learn to have productive and thoughtful conversations, even when they disagree on something?”

These questions are a great place to start:

 

A cell phone with the words "Is it true?"

A man holding a cell phone with the words "Is it helpful?"

A hand holding a cell phone with the words "Is it inspiring?"

Someone texting with the words "Is it necessary?"

A keyboard with the words "Is it kind?"

 

 

Source: Dr. Cara Berg Powers, The Renewal Project, “5 tips for civic dialogue online”

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