'Try to keep a cool head'

I don't know if he's a parent, but teacher and commentator Scott Granneman makes some useful observations for parents and everybody involved with teens using Web 2.0 in "MySpace, a place without MyParents" at SecurityFocus.com. After running through (and linking to news stories about) a bunch the latest exploits by teens and victimizing teens on social networks I've linked you to too, he tells this anecdote: "When I was a high school English teacher many years ago, I had a 9th grade student who confided a terrible story to me one day. When she was in the 8th grade, she started prank calling people on weekends to break up her boredom. One Saturday night the guy on the other end of the phone didn't hang up like all the others. Instead, he talked to her. The phone talks continued, and soon they met. You can guess the rest…. So since that sicko used the telephone to meet his victim, we should ban phones? Or at least tightly control how kids use them, with age restrictions and credit card verifications? Of course not. The fact is, every new technology has been used by people to perform, or enable, illicit and illegal acts. MySpace, and the Internet in general, simply expands the ability of people to communicate easily over distance more than any other tool that humanity has created…. Any time you allow humans to come into contact with each other, there's the potential for exploitation. That doesn't mean disaster is guaranteed, however. It just means that we need to try to keep a cool head and not allow blind emotion and fear to cloud our better judgments." Or our ability to talk with our kids about their social lives, offline and online. Don't miss his account of a parent-teacher conference with the parents of one of his smarter but less engaged 9th-grade students on p. 2 of the article. [Granneman's commentary was picked up by The Register in the UK.]