Tag: social media

  • Is Privacy Worth Worrying About?

    Is Privacy Worth Worrying About?

    This morning I had to add my debit card number into Facebook Messenger in order to receive some money someone sent me. And just for a minute I thought, “Do I really want to give my debit card number to Facebook? I mean they just had yet another data breach of nearly 267,000,000 American users…

  • Parents, Look Out for Curious Cat

    Parents, Look Out for Curious Cat

    Here we go again. Another app lying to users.  There is yet another anonymous question asking/confession social media app floating around the internet claiming they’ve solved the bullying (and suicides) that plague older confessional apps like Ask.fm, this one borrows it’s name from the ever-popular cat movement online: Curious Cat.

  • Sexting and the Attack on the American Teenager

    This is what I call “The Slow News Day” story Make no bones about it, stories like this raise eyebrows and get people talking. When USA Today ran this piece last week it was run and rerun over and over again at newspapers around the country. It is a well-articulated story. It seems so… true.…

  • Social Media Rule #1 – Everything posted online is public

    In this post, Adam McLane talks about social media rule #1: Everything you post online is public, using examples from Mark Zuckerberg and Steubenville High School.

  • A secret deal on my book

    My new book, co-authored with Marko, comes out next week. I’m very excited about it for two specific reasons. Parents of teenagers really need this book. The days of fighting or banning or trying to wall off kids from social media is over. Parents need to know how to help their child live a life that…

  • Notifications are of the Devil

    The Internet Loop Do you catch yourself in a compulsive loop sometimes? For me? Right now it starts with email. Then I go to Twitter, then Facebook, then Instagram, then ESPN.com. If things are particularly interesting I’ll go around the loop 2 or 3 times in a row. This is what psychologist John Grohol calls…

  • FREE RESOURCE: YouTube You Can Use

    Each week I produce a free resource called, YouTube You Can Use. The concept is simple. I take a viral video from YouTube and write a small discussion starter and/or devotional based on the content. Currently, more than 1100 people around the world receive it each Monday. They use in their youth groups, in small…

  • How to talk to parents about parenting

    Over the past year or so I’ve had the opportunity to lead an hour-long seminars for parents. In fact, earlier this year partnered with Simply Youth Ministry & Marko to turn the content of my seminar into a book that comes out in a few weeks, A Parent’s Guide to Understanding Social Media. For me,…

  • Social Media is Linked to Depression

    Researchers at Missouri University of Science and Technology have linked depressive symptoms in college students to their internet usage. It’s a small study, only 216 participants over 1 month, but the correlation quantifies what other researches have hypothesized. This is the first of its kind that overlaid subjects actual internet usage and diagnostic testing. Participants were…

  • A Parent’s Guide to Social Media

    Last week, I put together a sweet little seminar for parent’s called, A Parent’s Guide to Social Media. It’s an hour-long training session aimed at removing the fear about what their teenagers might be doing online and back-filling it with the latest research, then helps to build a theological framework for raising kids in a…