ReadWriteWeb

The Internet is fascinated by teenagers. People are in awe of the things that teenagers do and say, online and offline.

Dr. danah boyd, a senior researcher at Microsoft, assistant professor at NYU and fellow at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, thinks that perhaps adults are worrying too much about what teenagers are doing and saying online. What happens at lunchtime on the playground is now happening on the Internet, mostly on social media sites. Kids talk about stuff they can't discuss in class, they flirt with each other, they make crude jokes. They openly discuss what they'd never utter at the family dinner table.

The stories that we hear about teens and technology often border on hysteria. Technology is ruining their grades. It's ruining their eyesight. It's making them fat. It's exposing them to dangerous people, dangerous ideas. It encourages stupid, senseless behavior - the sorts of things that will ruin their lives forever.

Sure, it's easy to dismiss some of this as a fairly standard cultural response to new technology and to shifting cultural norms. Many of these fears echo those we've heard about other, older technologies - video games, the television, the phonograph, the telephone.

And yet the stakes do seem much higher now, in part because of the speed with which information can travel. A message - or more damning, a photo - can go viral, spreading gossip far beyond the school grounds or the local community.

Richard MacManus, ReadWriteWeb founder, and Mike McCue, Flipboard founder and CEO

Two years ago, ethnographer danah boyd had the blogosphere abuzz with her look at class-based divisions between teens on MySpace and Facebook. The esteemed Microsoft researcher found that Facebook's collegiate origins encouraged a group of slightly more educated mainstream community members. Meanwhile, MySpace encouraged self-expression and the organizing of subcultures. boyd's latest paper entitled, "White Flight in Networked Publics? How Race and Class Shaped American Teen Engagement with MySpace and Facebook" suggests that those same origins also propel race-based divisions. She likens the mass teen migration from MySpace to Facebook to "white flight".

Microsoft researcher danah boyd took a decidedly different approach when considering social networking at today's LeWeb conference. In speaking to a room packed with more than a thousand entrepreneurs, investors and journalists, boyd explained how we tend to focus on the positive aspects of social networking services. Technologists tend to praise web publishing for its ability to encourage artistic expression and public dialogue. In contrast, boyd makes the point that negative and disturbing web content can also serve as a vehicle for change.

The 20th century news and stock ticker used to be one of the most archetypal images of newsrooms all around the world. It was timely and exciting, if a bit impersonal, for editors to watch the wires for breaking news from the big news syndicates and select stories to run in the local paper. That ticker doesn't print everything out any more, though, and a constant stream of news is something that millions of consumers now see for themselves inside their RSS feed readers.

How are newspapers adapting to digital syndication? Today the Associated Press announced that more than 500 newspapers are using their service called the AP Member Marketplace. To web savvy consumers, the Marketplace might look like an RSS reader that publishes selected stories to a webpage built out of Del.icio.us badges. It's a pretty interesting program.