The current issue of U.S. News & World Report has a pretty good cover story about Myspace.com, the teenage social networking website that has more than 100 million profiles (remember, the population of the U.S. is only 300 million--or rather, is set to hit 300 million in October: see post below).
The article has a good mix of the interesting and helpful, though a big dose of the inane, too, like this Sherlock Flippin' Holmes moment:
Parents need to be on the lookout, experts say, for unfamiliar friends who contact their children online out of the blue, as well as risky behavior on the part of kids themselves that makes them targets for predators. Too often teens post erotic photos in which they pose suggestively and expose plenty of skin, using screen names like "nasty" or "sexygirl." In their personal description, they may say they're wild or curious about having sex with a stranger.
I also like (I'm being sarcastic) this tacit belief that other people should have responsibility for monitoring your children's social lives:
You may have never sent an instant message, uploaded a video, or written a blog, but you can help your kids develop the judgment to better protect their safety online and set standards that will help guide their behavior. This is especially important since legislation that recently passed the House of Representatives and is currently under consideration by the Senate would ban social-networking sites from schools and libraries, leaving parents as the only consistent adult arbiter of their children's day-to-day social-networking behavior.
Despite clunkers like those, the article has some good stuff, like this observation:
[W]ith virtually no supervision or monitoring of conversations online, casual banter and egging each other on about sex through online posts and instant messages ("I heard Carmen and Dave hooked up at a party." Response: "No, but he wants to!!!") set the stage for sexual experimentation once kids meet face to face. "Developmentally, the envelope has always been pushed during adolescence," says Sharon Maxwell, a clinical psychologist in Canton, Mass., who specializes in teen sexuality, "but never without any rules. And now it all happens more quickly." This speeding up of sexual development is most pronounced among middle schoolers, Maxwell says.
What does an adult do with this information? The article has helpful hints, but they don't solve the problem, which is this: on-line networking is a medium that most parents have never experienced and no parents today ever exprienced as teenagers. How does social networking affect a teenager? How does it subtly affect their mental landscape? These are McLuhanite-like issues that are hard to figure out, even if a person is using the new medium. For those parents who aren't, I'm not sure how the issues can be sorted out at all.
