The PEW Center on Kids and Social Networks

How does social networking via the Web fit into our daily lives? How about the daily lives of youth throughout the world? Have the K-through-12 forgone the ritual meets at the lunch tables, the trading of notes across aisle, the locker talk for searches through the servers of MySpace, Facebook, and Orkut? Has the term “friend” taken on new meaning? Are we at a place in time where an alias has the same clout and charisma as a Joseph, a Michael, an Ahmed, a Christine?

Joshua Porter of Bokardo, a site dedicated to “social web design”, posted the results of a Pew study a few days ago about the trend toward online social networking among youth. Surprisingly, the facts Pew has uncovered offer generally lighthearted news on the matter. Adults need not freak out over their children’s after-school jaunts on the web. Most of the time, Pew researchers have found, kids are just staying in touch.

Whereas for years parents have been blasting chatrooms and sites that can expose their children to predators, the reality is that the vast majority of individual teenagers have stated that the activity in their online circles is rarely divergent from their face-to-face interactions, and, almost as a bonus, even those friends one would ordinarily lose contact with through a move to different county, state, or country, are said to remain more connected now that social networking sites exist. Of course, polls only tell half the story.

Despite the noticeable drop in physically intimate relationships between teenagers (to put it simply, more are “waiting”) over the last decade, mostly attributable to the widespread adoption of sex-ed course in public schools, the results from the Pew study can hardly be accurate. Teenagers asked whether they flirt or had flirted with others through sites like MySpace, Facebook, and chatrooms on Yahoo! and the like responded with a “yes” only 17% of the time. That hardly seems plausible, considering that children throughout the world, especially those in well-networked societies, have more options than ever to experiment – however safer such experimentation might be.

But regardless of these discrepancies, the Pew study seemed to OK the idea of networking through online communities, and I agree with the conclusion.

We’ve all camouflaged ourselves in hallways at school. We’ve all grown accustomed to the cliques. And we’ve known how wrong we can be in making snap judgements. In short, it’s better to learn more about someone before a comment escapes one’s lips. Sites like MySpace and Facebook are said to help people learn more about their peers in an environment that separates the embarrassment from the inquisitiveness.

If there exists a way to buck the trends and open minds, particularly at an age when the greatest impacts on one’s life tend to be made, then societies would do well to work creative outlets - such as these social networks of millions - into our lives, rather than subject these powerful, expressive places to the title of “outlaws” or “troublemakers”. They’re essential today to the fabric of the modern teenage life, and they’ll continue to shift, adapt, and grow as tastes and free-flowing trends change. One thing they will not do, however, is disappear.

So to all the parents out there yearning for the day that MySpace meets its doom to come soon: give the worry a rest. Kids are shown to be more responsible today than ever before. Yes, one could say youth tended to be a more “proper” bunch in the Victorian era and when hard times forced them to play increasingly significant and productive roles in family life. But today they appear to be taking care of themselves more often - and doing a pretty good job of it, too. Knowing your teenager is conversing on Facebook doesn’t mean knowing they’re up to no good. It just means they’re smartly taking to a system that will soon prove as essential for success in live and in work as the age-old hi-ya, hello, and handshake. Of course, they should learn to do that too, so you’ll still need to do some good, quality parenting. Just because they’re growing up faster doesn’t mean you can retire your role sooner.