This has felt like a heavy week all around, so I wanted to wrap it up with a little levity. My favorite article this week was Michelle Slatalla's New York Times piece, "These Naughty Gifts Don't Clutter a Closet." She put the utter absurdity of Facebook applications into perspective, as she described the various virtual Naughty Gifts that one can send to friends, "thigh-high black platform boots...foil-wrapped condoms, black thongs and cans of something called Mr. Whipped Cream."
You see, in real life I've been talking to mom-friends quite a bit about Facebook, and everyone is confused about what standards to use to judge your own kid's behavior when it comes to online personae. Most parents find they have to settle for something decidedly less dignified than they would normally accept.
After all, if you get a call from the principal saying that your teen was "throwing poo" at school, that would be cause for major alarm. But for teens online, it's just another fun way to say hi. Slatalla turned the tables on her family by in some very un-mom-like behavior on Facebook herself.
The end of civilization as we know it? Probably not. Michelle Slatalla gives me hope that parents might even survive with an intact sense of humor.
A recent Read/WriteWeb post pointed me to a new Pew/Internet Survey that suggests that "teens" (defined in this study as 12- to 17-year-olds) may view contact by people they don't know as a "cost of doing business" in the online social network environment.
The Pew survey found that about a third of online teens had been contacted online by someone with no connection to them or their friends. Overall, studying all online teens, 7 percent of them had experienced stranger contact that made them feel scared or uncomfortable.
It is important to note that when you look at group of teens who had been contacted by a stranger, nearly of a quarter of them say they felt scared or uncomfortable. Girls were more likely to feel this way, 27 percent compared with 15 percent of boys.
What do these results mean for parents? Social networks are becoming the norm for kids and teens, and "networking" means meeting new people. The question is always how to help kids learn to safely negotiate the public contact that comes into our home through online exposure.
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