International Law

Are your parents on MySpace?

CNN looks at how teenagers and young adults are apprehensive when parents and others encroach upon what they see as "their space":

Scott Seigal was awakened one recent early morning by a cell phone text message. It was from his girlfriend's mother.

His friends' parents have posted greetings on his MySpace page for all the world to see. And his 72-year-old grandmother sends him online instant messages every day so they can better stay in touch while he's at college.

"It's nice that adults know SOME things," says Seigal, an 18-year-old freshman at Binghamton University in New York. He especially likes IMing with his grandma because he's "not a huge talker on the phone."

Increasingly, however, he and other young people are feeling uncomfortable about their elders encroaching on what many young adults and teens consider their technological turf.

Long gone are the days when the average, middle-aged adult did well to simply work a computer. Now those same adults have Gmail, upload videos on YouTube, and sport the latest high-tech gadgets.

Young people have responded, as they always have, by searching out the latest way to stay ahead in the race for technological know-how and cool. They use Twitter, which allows blogging from one's mobile phone or BlackBerry, or Hulu.com, a site where they can download videos and TV programs.

They customize their cell phones with various faceplates and ringtones. And, sometimes, they find ways to exclude adults -- using high-frequency ringtones that teens can hear but most adults can't, for instance.

Nowhere are the technological turf wars more apparent than on social networking sites, such as MySpace and Facebook, which went from being student-oriented to allowing adults outside the college ranks to join.

Gary Rudman, a California-based youth market researcher, has heard the complaints. He regularly interviews young people who think it's "creepy" when an older person -- we're talking someone they know -- asks to join their social network as a "friend." It means, among other things, that they can view each others' profiles and what they and their friends post.

"It would be like a 40-year-old attending the prom or a frat party," Rudman says. "It just doesn't work."

It's a particular quandary for image-conscious teens, says Eric Kuhn, a junior at Hamilton College in upstate New York, who's blogged about the etiquette of social networking.

Read more here.

Full post as published by Freedom to Differ on January 24, 2008 (boomark / email).