[Infowarrior] - Teens Online: Not a Freak Zone

[Richard Forno]

Teens Online: Not a Freak Zone

By Regina Lynn| Also by this reporter
02:00 AM Jul, 28, 2006
http://www.wired.com/news/columns/1,71482-0.html

When I look at MySpace.com, I see a revved-up, high-octane,
super-turbo-powered version of the internet, early 1990s. Or maybe AOL is a
better comparison, a subcommunity built on top of the regular internet and a
little to the side.

MySpace has all the modern goodies like video and click-to-add-friends
networking and interactive event calendars, along with user profiles that
remind me of what we used to call "free web pages."

But it doesn't have anything the internet didn't already have. I'm talking,
of course, about people. Of all kinds.

One thing that makes something popular among young people is that it baffles
older people. Like cars, rock 'n' roll and mobile phones, MySpace offers new
freedoms to teenagers that have many parents scrambling to keep up.

"Teens, sex, the internet -- it's the three biggest fears mixed together,"
says L. Kris Gowen, who teaches human sexuality at Portland State University
in Oregon. "It's hard for an adult to think rationally."

Gowen has written several sex-ed books for teens. As a veteran of the
dot-com era in San Francisco, Gowen has seen firsthand the impact of the
internet on sexuality, particularly among youth.

She has also seen ignorance, confusion and nervousness among adults -- about
the technology more than about teen sexuality. Many parents, teachers and
counselors discover what teens are doing online almost entirely through the
media.

"Media always portray new technology in alarmist, 'the world ends tomorrow'
fashion," she says. "You get the sense that MySpace is an online sexual orgy
where adults and kids sleep together in some kind of culty illicit
community. That's really not what's going on."

To show adults a more accurate picture of how teens use the internet, Gowen
developed the Virtual Mystery Tour workshop to guide grown-ups through the
tools and communities popular among young people.

"My goal is to get parents to ask more informed questions so they can have a
dialogue with their kid without feeling like they're at a quantum physics
lecture," she says. "I want them to be able to ask intelligent questions, to
know the lingo, not just 'what's that MySpace thing?'"

We don't have a lot of hard data about teenagers' internet use around sex,
she explains, mentioning one paper that cited a New York Times Magazine
article about teenagers hooking up with each other online. ("In a research
paper? That's not evidence!")

"We do know that about one in three teens has looked up sex information
online," she says. "We know anecdotally some teens are cybering. Teens
definitely use the internet to talk about sex and experiment with being a
sexual being."

But no one knows how many teens have actually used the internet to set up
meetings with people they didn't already know, Gowen says. We don't know how
many have actively pursued cybersex, or how many have received direct sexual
come-ons from adults.

A 1999 study (.pdf) from the National Center for Missing and Exploited
Children found that one in five internet users aged 10 to 17 were sexually
solicited online. The paper defined "sexually solicited" to include
everything from requests to meet offline to unwanted exposure to sexual
content -- the researchers even included spam.

The University of North Carolina's Add Health project, which recently
studied the dubious efficacy of virginity pledges, lumps the internet in
with other media, Gowen says.

I find that shocking. Despite recent attempts to turn the internet into
television, it isn't, and it won't ever be. The internet is about connection
first, information second, with passive consumption way down the list.

Treating the internet as merely another part of "the media" makes no sense,
especially around sex. Other media can offer sexual content; the internet,
even more than the telephone, offers sexual interaction -- with peers, with
educators, with performers and, unfortunately, with creeps, too. The
internet is a medium. It's not the media.

One exercise in the Virtual Mystery Tour is a reality check in which the
group diagrams the subsets of teen online interaction.

For example, most teens use instant messaging. Of those, most only converse
with their real-life friends and family -- people they already know. You
then have a very small subset of kids who IM with strangers, and of them, a
smaller percentage that meet up in person.

"The at-risk kids, those not getting along with their parents, who have no
friends, who are sad or depressed, are more likely to (form online
relationships over) IM and meet face to face and then admit the person
wasn't what they expected," Gowen says. "The same population at risk for
everything else is at risk here."

The Virtual Mystery Tour is not an attempt to paint a falsely positive
picture that ignores the potential for young internet users to get into
dangerous situations. "A few (participants) end up even more horrified,
people who say, 'I still think this sucks, I'm going to ban it from my
teens," she says. "But that's OK. I can't change everybody. At least I got
them looking at it and not being as scared of it."

She reassures parents that if their kids have common sense and they trust
them in other ways, they're probably going to be able to talk intelligently
with parents about what they should and shouldn't do online.

And she reminds us that teens, like adults, generally feel freer to express
themselves online in a false sense of anonymity and safety, but they often
don’t realize the potential consequences that over-sharing can have. One
part of the Virtual Mystery Tour focuses on teen identity and how teenagers
portray themselves online, especially in youth-oriented communities.

As for how much danger teenagers are actually in, Gowen is more interested
in what we actually know than what we feel.

"Both are important to address, but what's missing is information on what we
know," says Gowen, who is also a member of the Sex Drive forum. "For
whatever reason, the research community is not asking about (the internet).
If they had asked anyone in the (forum), we'd have said, 'You're missing
something big.'"

See you next Friday,

Regina Lynn

- - -
Regina Lynn invites you to converse with Dr. Gowen and other interesting
people in the Sex Drive forum.