Posted on 05/11/2006 8:24:22 AM PDT by craig_eddy
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - They paper their virtual walls with kittens and cartoon characters, give their address as Candyland, their age as 103 and announce they are yearning for true love.
Welcome to the secret, yet very public, world of young teens who are flocking to social-networking Internet sites both to chill with friends and to figure out the timeless adolescent question "Who am I?"
As the real world is perceived as more dangerous with child abductors lurking on every corner, kids flock online to hang out with friends, express their hopes and dreams and bare their souls with often painful honesty -- mostly unbeknownst to their tech-clumsy parents.
"We have a complete culture of fear," said Danah Boyd, 28, a Ph.D student and social media researcher at the University of California Berkeley. "Kids really have no place where they are not under constant surveillance."
Driven to and from school, chaperoned at parties and often lacking public transport, today's middle-class American kids are no longer free to hang out unsupervised at the park, the bowling alley or to bike around the neighborhood they way they did 20 years ago.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
The "constant surveillance" line is a load of crap designed to play to the people who want to villify conservative values...
Video games suck.
How many kids does 28-year-old Danah Boyd have?
Twenty years ago, we didn't have the freedom kids enjoyed twenty years ago.
As the real world is perceived as more dangerous with child abductors lurking on every corner
I don't see that at all. The "constant surveillance" is a natural reaction by parents to almost daily reports of children being abducted and molested or worse.
I hate to tell them but kids today have far more "freedom" than I had as a kid.
"How many kids does 28-year-old Danah Boyd have?"
Give her a break, I'm sure she's seen pictures.
I completely missed this one when I posted the article, so here's my commentary on this line:
Where are their parents? Why aren't they discussing their hopes and dreams with them?
Perhaps their parents no longer have hopes and dreams. It's my opinion that most of middle class America has become slaves to their careers. No longer do they HAVE hopes and dreams, so how can they teach their children how to have hope, how to dream of a better life?
Americans, by and large, lead lives of quiet desparation, trapped by mortgages, taxes, and attempting to save for "retirement" someday. Trapped in a system where they'll never be able to outearn taxes and inflation, merely trading hours for dollars.
Too bad we've convinced the last two generations that "grow up, get a good education, and work for a good company or the government" is the ticket to success.
And thats wrong, why?
I mis-spoke then...I mean the author uses that line to evoke (or is the word invoke?) the negative feedback against the "nazi" conservatives. I agree with the premise.
Believe me, I'm always watching my little ones, even when they're just in the front yard, for that very same reason.
All the teens and pervs used to be in AOL chatrooms. Now they're on MySpace. Big whoop. I hope local and Federal law enforcement use MySpace to create honeypots for the pervs.
When my kids turn 12 I start letting them go off unsupervised for significant periods of time. I like to treat them like they're responsible until they prove to me that they're not....
Of course, there are ways to supervise them even when they're unsupervised....
Actually, i agree.....
Recently Ct and CA passed laws forbidding soda sales in schools--limiting freedom. The nanny state is prevailing everywhere.
More and more states are raising the driving age.
All you hear on radio and TV is advertising for news shows exposing the "predators who are preying on our kids".
So it does not surprise me that kids are forming a sub culture devoid of parental and govt interference.
You've got that right D-Chivas. I've blocked all access to MySpace.com and all it's hidden addresses via my router.
The side benefit was the number of viruses and ad robots dropped to almost zero on my daughters PC after it was blocked. At one time she had over 150 viruses and spyware robots slowing here PC to an absolute crawl. It took me over 4 hours to remove them all as I kept running out of system memory during the removal process.
Bingo.
I see people, largely Liberal people, bemoaning the current state of society -- and not realizing that the current state of society has been constructed by the Sexual Revolution, Women's Lib, Gay Rights, and the Nanny State. Most of "what's wrong" can be pinned on the Liberals.
But they don't see themselves as the problem. They see themselves as the cure.
Excerpt:
My name is danah boyd and i am a PhD student at the School of Information (SIMS) at the University of California, Berkeley. My research focuses on how people negotiate a presentation of self to unknown audiences in mediated contexts. In particular, my dissertation is looking at how youth develop a sense of individual and cultural identity in "public" online environments like LiveJournal, Xanga and MySpace. Additionally, i am concerned with how digital publics do not look like the physical publics that we traditionally consider.Polite description: this is a woman with issues.Prior to my current project, i studied blogging, articulated social network services (e.g. Friendster, Tribe.net, LinkedIn...). I have written papers on a variety of different topics, from digital backchannels to social visualization design, sexing of internet interactions to creating artifacts for memory work.
I am currently being advised by Peter Lyman at SIMS and Mimi Ito at USC-Annenberg Center. Prior to Berkeley, i was a graduate student in the Sociable Media Group with Judith Donath at the MIT Media Lab. My master's thesis focused on how people manage their identity presentation in relation to social contextual information. As an undergraduate, i studied computer science at Brown University with Andy van Dam. My undergrad thesis focused on how sex hormones affect prioritization of depth cues and how this affects use of virtual reality systems.
Outside of research, i have been involved in various activist organizations. For five years, i worked at V-Day, an organization working to end violence against women and girls worldwide.
Honest description: she's a flake.
(steely)
Yep. When my son started going off on his own to the store and barbershop, etc., I would stop in when he wasn't with me and ask if he'd behaved. The line 'I can't watch them every minute of the day' doesn't hold any water with me. You can be a responsible parent, even when the kids are out in the street, if you take the time.
Yes--As the Nanny State prevails, the govt creates more and more perverse intrusions into everyday life. You can't drive without a seatbelt, you can't buy soda in school, you can't drive a car until you are 18. Little Johny must be tethered into the car seat until he is six foot two and weighs 200 pounds.
I am not an advocate of teen predators or anything...but I do see alot of rules and regulations that teens are naturally going to rebel against.
So they go to MySpace, where they can be under constant surveillance by anybody on the planet as well as their parents.
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