Doc, I doubt you read me, but I wonder how you feel about Xanga and MySpace and the fact that for many, many 13 year olds these days, spending time participating is as important as what takes place in the lunchroom or in the school yard?

Because this makes me think you have no idea what’s going on:

I think letting small children watch TV is like giving them Quaaludes. I also think kids in their most formative years need to interact with each other, nature, and themselves. They need to read and play and feed their curiousity about the world. They need to use their minds and their bodies to explore the Real World.

Is the Net real too? I don’t think anybody loves the Net more than I do; but I don’t want my kid doing much more than using it as an educational resource every once in awhile. If you’re going to get sucked into an activity, let it be reading a book, shooting baskets or playing an instrument.

TV and computers have never been big in our 9-year-old’s life. Starting when he was about 5, however, we began limiting his TV watching (and ours as well) to an amount that rounds to zero. As a result, his main indulgence is reading. He plows through several books a week. He has a delightful imagination and an adult vocabulary. Yet he still has plenty of time to play. It’s amazing how much a kid can do if he or she isn’t watching 6+ hours of tube a day.

I think the time will come when we’ll look back on massive media consumption by kids in the same way we look back today on ubiquitous smoking and blasé attitudes toward drunk driving.

We’ve been building something that encourages people of all ages and background to share, to live their identities online.

I don’t think anybody loves the Net more than I do; but I don’t want my kid doing much more than using it as an educational resource every once in awhile. Blogging and other social media services on the web are evolving to enable, empower, and encourage the web’s use as a primary social hub in our lives, that when disconnected from, we are disconnected period. And an element of this that gets short shrift is just how public all this is.

How will you handle it when your son starts to share not only what music he loves, but who in his classroom is “cool” and why? With oh… 20 million other people. Permanently. Cached and indexed. That day is already here for parents across the country.

Read Danah Boyd’s “Identity Production in a Networked Culture: Why Youth Heart MySpace”:

Adults often worry about the amount of time that youth spend online, arguing that the digital does not replace the physical. Most teens would agree. It is not the technology that encourages youth to spend time online – it’s the lack of mobility and access to youth space where they can hang out uninterrupted.

In this context, there are three important classes of space: public, private and controlled. For adults, the home is the private sphere where they relax amidst family and close friends. The public sphere is the world amongst strangers and people of all statuses where one must put forward one’s best face. For most adults, work is a controlled space where bosses dictate the norms and acceptable behavior.

Teenager’s space segmentation is slightly different. Most of their space is controlled space. Adults with authority control the home, the school, and most activity spaces. Teens are told where to be, what to do and how to do it. Because teens feel a lack of control at home, many don’t see it as their private space.

To them, private space is youth space and it is primarily found in the interstices of controlled space. These are the places where youth gather to hang out amongst friends and make public or controlled spaces their own. Bedrooms with closed doors, for example.

Adult public spaces are typically controlled spaces for teens. Their public space is where peers gather en masse; this is where presentation of self really matters. It may be viewable to adults, but it is really peers that matter.

Teens have increasingly less access to public space. Classic 1950s hang out locations like the roller rink and burger joint are disappearing while malls and 7/11s are banning teens unaccompanied by parents. Hanging out around the neighborhood or in the woods has been deemed unsafe for fear of predators, drug dealers and abductors. Teens who go home after school while their parents are still working are expected to stay home and teens are mostly allowed to only gather at friends’ homes when their parents are present.

Additionally, structured activities in controlled spaces are on the rise. After school activities, sports, and jobs are typical across all socio-economic classes and many teens are in controlled spaces from dawn till dusk. They are running ragged without any time to simply chill amongst friends.

By going virtual, digital technologies allow youth to (re)create private and public youth space while physically in controlled spaces. IM serves as a private space while MySpace provide a public component. Online, youth can build the environments that support youth socialization.

There will be deserved talk today over how a group of Right-wing bloggers and talking radio party mouth-pieces (note not all, some have withstood criticism and not joined the mob – and yes it is a mob), took Jill Carroll‘s release, instead of a cause for celebration, or at least pause, to be a moment to viciously attack a fellow American for different world views. They took the circumstances around her being let go from her captors and the propaganda tape she was forced to make as evidence of her being anti-American and in league with terrorists. Attacking a victim of fear and hatred with more fear and hatred.

Right Wing Nut House’s “TWICE A VICTIM” was especially powerful in its critique and concern:

In people’s haste to be first, or different, or just plain ornery and contrary (all the better to get links and readers) a culture of “shoot first and ask questions later” has arisen in the blogosphere that quite frankly, is proving every bad thing that the MSM has been saying about blogs from the beginning. Many of us – including myself – have been guilty in the past of hitting that “Publish” button when perhaps it would have been prudent and proper to take a beat or two to think about what we just wrote and the impact it might have beyond the small little world we inhabit in this corner of Blogland.

Scalp hunting has become the national pastime of blogs. Both lefty and righty lodgepoles have some pretty impressive trophies hanging on them; Dan Rather, Mary Mapes (twice), Eason Jordon, Trent Lott, Ben Domenech, to name a few more noteworthy ones.

But is this what we are? Is this what we are becoming? Are we nothing more than a pack of digital yellow journalists writing pixelated scab sheets vying to see who we can lay low next? If this be the way to fame and fortune in the blogosphere, I truly fear that, like television, the last great technological breakthrough that promised to change the world, we will degenerate into a mindless, bottomless pit of muck and mudslinging, dragging down the culture and trivializing even the most important issues.

This is no idle concern that can be dismissed as the nature of the beast or the way of the world. This kind of thing has to be stopped, an admitted impossibility with 29 million blogs out there. Maybe it’s enough that we are aware of it and that people of good faith and good intentions will, in the end, marginalize the muckrakers and come out on top.

Don’t count on it.

…My question is what will the blogosphere look like 5 years from now? If things continue the way they are, we’ll be just another cog in the great mass communications bordeom killing machine, titillating and entertaining our readers with our own snarky takes on the dirt dished by the MSM while our blogs are festooned with ads for everything from cold cream to the latest super-absorbent manifestation of Depends.

So much for citizen-journalists…

The blogs that jumped in on this hate machine have a ton a visibility, at least one was venerated by Time magazine. More important – the dirt they are dishing will have a long term echo because on the web, nothing is ever forgotten, and on the web, he (or she) who has the most inbound links, has the most influence. The sad thing is such hatred and partisanship draws MORE linkage and influence. And some who work for the the old guard are watching.

The Moderate Voice: Jill Carroll Hostage Case: A Black Eye To Blogging (UPDATED):

If each time a weblog screeches that X person hates America or X person is a fascist it gets kind of old — unless you are a member of a choir that wants to hear the same song over and over. There’s nothing wrong with that — but it does NOT enhance the credibility of blogs.

Do blogs want to be news analyzers? Opinion shapers? Political influencers? Or do they want to become like the very worst extreme left and extreme right talk show hosts? If the choice is the latter, then why shouldn’t the news media view blogs as a written by a bunch of hyperactive political activists who want to get their harsh opinions out there first no matter what so they attract attention to themselves?

Indeed. So ask youself again, how could washingtonpost.com accidentally hire a plagerist to launch a blog to represent the views of “the majority of Americans” (which was on purpose – their goal to open their opinion section to more “diverse” opinion)?

Because it is learning, ahead of the curve, how to exploit blogs, by the worst of its examples. They seem to realize that blogs are not a threat, but something to be embraced and extended.

Good for them, but bad for us as a society. We can promote services to our better angels, or decide that promotion by division is the way to gain influence and then riches.

David Weinberger: “Small Pieces Loosely Joined”: The conversation I believe we need to have is about what the Web is showing us about ourselves. What is true to our nature and what only looked that way because it was a response to a world that was, until now, the only one we had?

He wrote those words back in 2002. That conversation still needs to take place.

With no barriers to entry to share at the speed of thought… well is this our true nature?

Lord I hope not.