Teen entrepreneur: Low entry fee

Parents could share this with teens at their house - for their inspiration or insights into a way into the job market. One of 18-year-old Jessica Mah's reasons for starting InternshipIN.com - true to its name, an internship-listings site - was "to show my friends (and the world) that it doesn't take more than a $200 to throw a Website together," she's quoted in TechCrunch as saying. It's a little raw, TechCrunch reports, but this newest project of the teen blogger and University of California, Berkeley, junior, has opened its "doors." I appreciated the context TechCrunch gives this story: "There are alternatives, such as After College.com. But a site that just does internship listings could work. What would be better would be a site that combines listings with ratings. Maybe Mah should try to pair up with InternshipRatings.com." See the article for comes examples of internships.

The text version of hanging out

There is a place for micro-blogging (such as with Twitter), and not just for hyper-communicative youth or parents on business trips who use it to keep in constant, drive-by touch with their kids. Fascinatingly,
Clive Thompson at Wired calls it "social proprioception" - the social version of the hand knowing what the foot's doing. He writes that Twitter "gives a group of people a sense of itself.... It's almost like ESP.... You know who's overloaded ... and who's on a roll.... Twitter substitutes for the glances and conversations we had before we became a nation of satellite employees." This is in contrast to past claims that the Net isolates us from one another, and it's where the social Web is heading, Clive suggests. He also offers a good reason for why it's widely misunderstood: It's "experiential" - you can't just view it to understand, you have to do it with a group of friends or colleagues, people with shared lives or interests. Dipping into it from the outside is like walking in on the hanging-out banter of a group of close teenaged friends - you not only need to know a bit about what they're talking about, you need to know them to understand what's going on.

Just because they crave attention?

Why do teens post such personal information online for all the world to see? The burning question of the first decade of the 21st century, perhaps - at least for parents and other digital non-natives. I'm late in pointing you to this, but "Exposed," a recent cover story of the New York Times Magazine looks at "oversharing" in the full, seemingly unedited story of Emily (Gould) the 20-something compulsive blogger. Her story suggests that the answer may partly be the reality TV phenomenon ("that the surest route to recognition is via humiliation in front of a panel of judges," aka random readers); genetics ("some people have always been more naturally inclined toward oversharing than others ... technology just enables us to overshare on a different scale"); a twisted concept of free speech acted out ("I kept coming back to the idea that I had a right to say whatever I wanted"); and crying out for attention. I agreed with her when she wrote: "I don't think people write online exclusively because they crave attention."

In any case, overexposure phenomenon is probably not going away - partly because diaries and journals will never go away and partly because the audience (or the imagined audience) certainly won't. As Emily told a Times reader in a Q&A the paper later published, "It's probably a pretty safe bet that people will continue to make mistakes online - after all, there is absolutely nothing stopping them from doing so besides themselves. This is the best and worst thing about the blogosphere," she continues, referring to its readers. "Other people's mistakes, which is to say, their impulsively revealed thoughts and opinions, can be fascinating."

Though there is pressure on young people to express themselves digitally, this doesn't mean oversharing is what social networking is all about and it doesn't mean all children will. The way teens express themselves online is highly individual. It also might help parents to know that privacy is no more black & white where personal blogging's concerned than is life itself. Emily refers to an important book that points this out: "I'm reading an interesting book right now about reputation and the Internet by Daniel Solove, and in it he posits that we've traditionally thought of privacy as a binary: private vs. public. He thinks that we should begin to think of degrees of semi-privacy, in terms of both self-regulation and legal regulation." And teens reportedly are already thinking in terms of degrees of privacy as well as of fact and fiction. For them, the latter isn't binary either: they add degrees of privacy by fictionalizing parts of what they present of themselves (see "Online aliases" and "Social networkers: Thinking about privacy").

But back to Emily's reference to "self-regulation." Isn't that where parenting comes in? Teaching (and hopefully modeling) self-regulation, as our rules for them are replaced by the trust they earn? It's not so much about shutting the blog or a compulsion down, maybe, as it is about providing perspective on privacy and self-respect. What has much more lasting value to them is helping them think about how broad their audience may actually (or ultimately) be, what image they're presenting of themselves now and when people encounter their content in the future, and how little control they have over what can happen to comments once online.

Related links

Author and professor Daniel Solove's The Future of Reputation

"The social Web's digital divide"

"Say Everything" in New York magazine

"The 'naked generation?'"

"Growing up in public"

"Nude photo-sharing: Q from a family that's been there"

"Generation Y has its own ideas of what privacy is" in the Naperville [Ill.] Sun

Teen name calling: Federal case

This is a story parents and teens should know about because it clearly illustrates how a student's mean comment in a public blog can literally become a federal case. US District Judge Mark Kravitz in Connecticut last week "ruled that Avery Doninger was outside her legal bounds when she used derogatory language on the Internet to describe school administrators," NBC TV in Burlington, Conn., reports. Last May Avery, then a junior, called school officials "douchbags" (sic) in a blog post she wrote from her home. After the school stopped her from seeking re-election as her class secretary, her mother filed a lawsuit against two school district officials saying they'd violated her daughter's right to free speech," the Hartford Courant reported. In his ruling, Judge Kravitz said school officials were within their rights "because Doninger's writing related to school and was likely to be read by other students" (see the last few paragraphs of the Courant's report for the two sides' arguments and the 1969 and 1986 cases they pointed to).

About this case, ConnectSafely.org Advisory Board member and youth officer Det. Frank Dannahey of the nearby Rocky Hill, Conn., Police Department wrote me, "I started using this incident in my programs when it occurred back in May. The community where this occurred is about 20 minutes away from where I work. It’s an interesting look at the never-ending saga of First Amendment rights vs. school systems' ability (or not) to discipline for out-of-school Internet postings." Here's an opinion piece about the case in the Hartford Courant. [Editor's note, 11/09: The stories linked to in this item unfortunately are no longer archived in the Hartford Courant and local NBC news sites.]