Thank you for this intelligent and sober discussion of the issues involved in current efforts to prevent teens from accessing online social communities. Though I am not a parent, I have friends that are (kinda inexplicably) in uber-panic-mode about their kids' myspace memberships. I have tried to explain what you and Henry Jenkins have expressed hereinb so much more articulately, and I am happy to have this interview to forward to them. It takes parental concerns seriously, and will calm their fears with in-depth on-line social community knowledge and down-to-earth advice.

I'm so tired of the panic -- and as an older women who frequents myspace (occasionally viewed with some parental suspicion, I suspect, because of my age,) I have and take many opportunities to engage in cross-generational communication that would not be possible anywhere else. It is energizing to me, and possibly helpful to younger people, to connect on topics that vary from art & literature, to politics & popular culture.

These are communication possibilities not often considered when myspace is discussed, and they present increasingly rare and valuable opportunities for me to share my education, and life knowledge and advice with people often half my age, and to receive energetic enthusiam in return. Without myspace, and younger people's access to it, these unlikely sorts of delightful spontaneous communications could not take place.

--QG

"We'll never survive a revolution by pretending it doesn't exist. And we ignore the ongoing revolution at great peril. The only people who can ever preserve those values of the old regime that need preserving are the ones who live at the center of the revolution.

So: Be at the center of the storm. Know what the computers can do and what can be done with them. Then ask yourself what human qualities you want to preserve into the 21st century and what human qualities you are ready to let go of -- for we will have to relinquish some of the old virtues.

We are being changed by the machine. And we are being changed radically. But let us not be changed absolutely,. Let us help one another to draw just a few crucial lines in the sand."

-- John Lienhard. "Children, Literacy and the Computer." A presentation to the ALA, June 30, 1997.
http://www.uh.edu/engines/alatalk.htm