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When PBS's Frontline reported on "Growing Up Online" this week, it called the gulf between kids who grew up with technology and their parents "the greatest generation gap since rock 'n' roll." That's a bitter pill to swallow for adults in their '30s and '40s who have been involved in computers for 20-plus years, but I have to say I agree with their assessment. Maybe we kicked it old school with Pong and the Atari 2600. Or we had a Commodore 64 or a Macintosh with a whopping 512K of memory. We may have even written code since we were teens ourselves, but that's nothing compared to growing up with ubiquitous access to cell phones, media, and social networking.

Producer Caitlin McNally describes this shift in thinking that exists even between her, as a twentysomething, and the teens she interviewed:

Despite the research we did, I don't think I was prepared when we started talking to kids for the extent to which the Internet and other electronic communication has permeated all aspects of being a teenager. Almost every kid expressed the utter importance of being connected with friends all the time and how unthinkable a life without that connection would be. I think a lot of kids were bemused by our list of questions about 'life online,' because they don't sit around thinking about the Internet in their lives. It's just there, always, another tool for them to use or place for them to go.

Cute, but ask parents before gifting.

Tech toys are all the rage this holiday gift-giving season, and I have a request for all the cool, creative, and wired aunts, uncles, and friends who are choosing presents for the kids in their lives. Please consult with parents before you buy a child a high-tech gift, especially any toy or gadget that has an online connection.

Just as you wouldn't spring a puppy on a family as a surprise, you should check in with parents before you give a tech toy. I can testify on behalf of frazzled parents, even those of us with a techie bent ourselves, that we are dancing as fast as we can to keep up with the implications of computers, gadgets, and online communication for our kids.

Here's the lede from a Phoenix local news story: "CBS 5 Investigates discovered some Valley teachers making their private lives public by posting them on the Web."

Is it really a news flash to learn that recent college grads who are now teachers use MySpace? And that teachers have content on their MySpace pages that they don't want their first-graders to see?

Here comes the online networking generation gap, moving from college into the working world.

Most college students use online social networks, so most new teachers will have social network profiles. And yes, some of the MySpace and Facebook pages will still bear traces of sophomoric behavior on them, given that these new teachers are only a few years removed from being sophomores.

Am I concerned about this issue as a parent? Yes, of course, potentially. But this particular "investigation" looks like a low trick (or height of FARK) as the CBS 5 team decided to systematically snoop into teachers' pages. The news program says they "took a list of teachers who just started teaching in Arizona and searched for them one at a time on MySpace, checking to see which ones have profiles and what they might show."

What disturbs me most is that the CBS 5 story moves to the question of what kind of "higher standards" we hold teachers to and is more than willing to keep raising the bar to create wildly unrealistic standards of off-duty conduct.

Heartbreak Hotel for theft victims?

The BBC reports that a Dutch teenager has been arrested for allegedly stealing 4,000 euros' (about $5,800) worth of virtual furniture from "rooms" in the social-networking site Habbo Hotel.

Five 15-year-olds have also been questioned by the police in connection to this incident. The six teens are suspected of moving the stolen furniture into their own Habbo rooms.

The lines between "virtual" and "reality" continue to blur. At first glance, the idea of stealing virtual furniture seems ludicrous. But, the furniture was paid for with real money. A Habbo Hotel spokesman told the BBC that "the accused lured victims into handing over their Habbo passwords by creating fake Habbo Web sites." So there is also a phishing fraud involved.

As I have spent the past few years analyzing the differences between the Boomers and Gen X, a yawning chasm has developed between Gen X and the teens and twentysomethings behind us. Years from now I still think we'll be mulling over the cultural divide between people who came of age using MySpace and Facebook, and those who didn't.

While we geezers (aka parents in their thirties and forties) mull over the technological and privacy implications of social networking, the generation behind us is adopting it as a given, and pushing the frontiers of sharing.

Case in point: a start-up called Shoeboxed was launched last July by a group of Duke University undergrads and recent grads. At first glance, I could wrap my mind around Shoeboxed's main concept. The service allows you to input all your receipts in order to keep track of them in one place. Got it.

But then they added a strange social-networking spin. Users are encouraged to "flaunt" their purchases by sharing them publicly. And then other users are encouraged to "let out your inner Mean Girl and go nuts with our stereotyping feature. Using the mouse is almost as easy as real-life stereotyping!"

Screenshot of Shoebox.com's stereotypes

Because we all know that what the world needs is more stereotyping! The Shoeboxed labels include "ghetto fabulous, attention whore, trust fund baby, teenage mother, playa, playa-hater, white trash, techy geek dork"....you get the idea. The prominent butt shot of the "ghetto fabulous" icon stands out as being particularly gratuitous.

Teens may be reacting with horror to the idea that Facebook is now open to everybody, so their parents may be showing up to butt into their social network.

I find myself on the other side of that equation, wondering "Why would I bother joining Facebook?" Fast Company recently discussed Facebook's growth, noting that "60 percent of the site's users are not in college networks, and the fastest-growing demographic is 25 and over." I had to laugh a bit at the broad swath covered by this statistic. Age 25 is a relatively recent college grad who is probably experiencing social networking as part of their peer experience.

As for those of use who are over age 30...well, let's say that no matter how wired we are, we did not exactly make a seamless transition from a yearbook to Facebook.

Quechup describes itself as "the social network platform sweeping the globe." But users are not happy with the kudzu-like growth of Quechup, as invitations to join are being spread through a controversial viral marketing campaign that is ticking off a lot of people.

When you join Quechup, the program searches your address book and sends an invitation out to everyone in your book. Users are somewhat accustomed to having contact lists searched to find out who else they know is already using the social network. The mass auto-invitations to everyone you know, sent in your name, forms a new and unwelcome twist.

A Facebook profile containing a photograph of young men posing with guns has been cited as a factor in a police shooting that killed an 18-year-old robbery suspect last December.

The shooting death of Peyton Strickland during the course of a police raid has been big news in North Carolina but has not been widely reported. Strickland was a suspect in the assault and robbery of a University of North Carolina at Wilmington student whose two Sony PlayStaton 3 machines were stolen.

During the police raid on Strickland's house, a deputy mistook the sound of a battering ram for gunfire and shot through the door, killing the unarmed Strickland.

The Raleigh News & Observer reported this week that the Facebook photos of another suspect posing with two buddies while brandishing a friend's gun collection led the police to expect to encounter heavily armed resistance during the raid. The police were fortified with weapons in anticipation of coming up against AR-15 firearms they had seen in the photograph.