Blog Alarmism: Kids Endangered

Blog Alarmism: Kids Endangered - The RSS Weblog - rss.weblogsinc.com _: "Meme density is thickening around the idea that teen blogs endanger their users, and parents must intervene to save their children from online stalkers. Several issues are rolled into this overarching alarmism, including parent-teen communication, trust, and the fact of widespread lying by the under-16 set to get into popular social networks. When pieces like this are published, one must object to the sloppy thinking. Statistics are cited: 38M-plus blogs currently in existence; the number will grow to over 50M by the end of this year; over half are operated by teens. Five-thousand reports of “attempted sexual predation over the Internet,” with four resultant deaths reported over three years. I would never dismiss or be glib about a single child’s death or harm. At the same time, when I tried to convert these numbers to a percentage of reported harm in a single year, my calculator found the result so inconsequential it returned a zero.

Isn’t it important to keep things real? If so, the question is this: Is teen blogging more dangerous than other activities that are not subject to parental and media hysteria? Is blogging more dangerous than walking home from school? Riding a bike? These days, we might ask whether blogging is more dangerous than sitting in the school cafeteria. I honestly don’t know any of these answers. But it seems quite possible that blogging is one of the safest teen socializations there is."