A “public” has no product, and there’s no call to work it all out here; but if we are committed to thinking about the digital world as a space that values diversity, minority viewpoints, and nondominant forms of expression, we need to make sure that the conversation is ongoing and open.

hearing a story about how one tweet can threaten to undo a lifetime of promising work?

Although many adults believe that they have the right to consume any teen content that is functionally accessible, many teens disagree.

Kids today. They have no sense of shame. They have no sense of privacy. They are show-offs, fame whores, pornographic little loons who post their diaries, their phone numbers, their stupid poetry

Every teenager wants privacy. Every single last one of them, whether they tell you or not, wants privacy.

Parents are no longer simply wor-ried about what their children wear out of the house but what they photograph themselves wearing in their bedroom to post online.

Many teens feel as though they’re in a no-win situation when it comes to sharing information online: damned if they publish their personal thoughts to public spaces, and damned if they create private space that parents can’t see.

But more often than not, teens talked about wanting to have a space where they weren’t constantly scrutinized by adults and peers.

I felt ostracized and misunderstood at school, but online I could portray myself as the person that I wanted to be.

When teens are talking to their friends, they interact differently than when they’re talking to their family or to their teachers.

I offered an alternative interpretation: perhaps this young man is simply including gang signals on his MySpace profile as a survival technique.