the zeitgeist report

We hear so many stories about bad things happening to kids through the internet. We seem to be in a patch of alarmist reporting about what kids are doing and potential for awfull things happening and documentation about what kids are being exposed to which they supposedly haven't been exposed to at any other time. This story might take things down a notch:

Despite parents' fears about how much time their teenagers spend sitting in the glow of a computer screen, social scientists say to just chill. The kids are doing just fine, thank you.

A panel of researchers told an international science conference Sunday that the online generation of teens is gaining valuable social and leadership skills, developing their sense of identity, creating their own space separate from adults and educating themselves about their world in often more effective ways than in classrooms.

It seems the internet can be another tool for communicating what they have always been communicating, but now it is leaving something that can be monitered and recorded. For many kids the internet has always been around and it is taken for granted that it is a way that they will communicate. They get it, they use it and it's not going away. Do we stop using the telephone because pople can use the phone to make obsene phone calls, or plan crimes? It is a tool.